Accountable
by AmberPalette
Summary: Sesshomaru's stoic mask threatens to crumble as he is increasingly haunted by reminders of his cherished ward Rin's mortality. Answering a challenge once issued by his father, he seeks a way to give Rin immortality-or at least express his love.
1. For Whom?

**Accountable **

**An InuYasha fanfiction**

By Amber C.S.

Disclaimer: I'm a total newbie to this fandom and this is my first contribution to it. I have seen all four movies. I am fairly well versed in the manga (am keeping up with the chapers in the 540's), and am in the process of finishing watching the entire anime.

My primary fascination is with Inuyasha's brother, Sesshomaru. Specifically, I am interested in how his character development is advanced by the orphaned human girl whose life he twice saved, Rin. Like most who prefer to take a nuanced and moderate stance, I see Sesshomaru as an anti-hero, not a villain. I see him as capable of affection of his own type, and of redemptive qualities, even if he may never be a protagonist figure. I think that Rin is the most successful means by which we are able to see the redemptive side of Sesshomaru. So I am writing a short, psychologically reflective piece from multiple 3rd-person viewpoints. This fanfiction will be many chapters long--how many I am not sure yet. I am sort of letting this flow organically.

**Let me make this clear NOW: I respect every position regarding romantic pairings in a fandom. However, I feel strongly that it is UNETHICAL to support a romantic relationship between Sesshomaru, who is fully adult, and the eight-year-old child Rin. To me, the relationship that is developing between them is strictly that of a _father and daughter_. If you do not agree with me, you are welcome to stop reading right here, right now, and you have EVERY RIGHT to your opinion. However: _I do not entertain flames or rude, unfounded remarks based on personal prejudice. Therefore do not waste your time or mine disagreeing with my views of these characters in an impolite fashion. YOU WILL BE REPORTED FOR ABUSIVE BEHAVIOR. Thank you for your mature cooperation. _**

Sesshomaru and his parents, Rin, Jaken, Inuyasha, and other characters of the anime and manga Inuyasha are © **Ms.** **Rumiko Takahashi**.

Enjoy.

**Chapter 1: For Whom?**

(**After Bakusaiga)**

His father had often asked him a single question.

"Sesshomaru, for whom or what are you accountable?"

He had never known how to respond. Even today, this late November afternoon, the grasses glazed with falling rain, he does not know how he might have responded.

He does not grasp the value or the purpose of such a question, closely linked to another that his father once asked: "Do you have someone to protect?" That latter question had also been something of a mandate, a gentle ultimatum: Protect someone, a reason for living sufficient unto itself—or I will not award you with the weapons that will enable you to conquer as ultimately as you wish.

Sesshomaru must have failed to meet that bargain, because his father had given him Tenseiga: the sword of healing. A sword useless to Sesshomaru. A sword incapable of slaying, conquering, and destroying as Sesshomaru saw necessary. Impotent in the foundation of a great western empire. A sword, however, that was bound to teach Sesshomaru how to acquire what he lacked.

"Lord Sesshomaru?"

Appropriate, then, that the tiny, dancing creature who had been his first experiment with Tenseiga tugs on his kimono sleeve while he ponders these heavy matters of accountability and protection and insufficiency.

"Lord Sesshomaru!"

Tug, tug.

"Milord?"

Yank.

"Milord!"

Her voice is like bamboo windchimes. Sweet, trilling. Like rain striking glass. Young—silver.

Sesshomaru shifts weight away from the human child's touch. The touch of Rin, his devoted young ward, and the only human being for whom he has ever cared. The movement is subtle but it teaches Rin without words that he does not appreciate the pestering. She stops immediately.

He loves her quiet intuition. She never gets in his way. She is his constant companion. Always when they travel, she prances in nimble little circles around him, while he elegantly strides, three tripping leaps for his every wide step—a great white stag and its fawn. Sesshomaru has never been capable of folly, of silliness or joy. He often feels that Rin provides these things for him, so that the sting of his half-colorless existence is dulled. She counters his catatonia. It is poetry.

"I am sorry to bother you, Lord Sesshomaru," the child mumbles. Her eyes are a crystalline brown, like maple sugar, like those root beer hard candies she once filched from the miko Kagome's backpack. She averts them now to the hem of his kimono. She fingers the red honeycomb design of that hem bashfully.

"You do not bother me, Rin," he informs her, his sonorous baritone carrying across the clearing of their camp like distant thunder. "What is it?"

"I am sad, milord. I saw an old woman and her grandchildren today." The child rests her head, with the scent of dandelions and wild strawberries, on his newly regrown left arm.

He can feel the tentative way her head reposes there, prepared to move should he be disgruntled by her affection. It is not the kind of tension that signifies she is insecure with him—rather, she is so determined to make him happy.

Her preoccupation with his satisfaction is almost too intense, and Sesshomaru is forever combating this tendency, reaffirming her agency and independence, telling her to "do as she pleases."

He has to say it to her at least once a day: "Do as you please, not as I please. That is what will most please me, Rin."

He does not realize that he has become the single-embodied stand-in for both her parents and her many brothers: her whole world, slain three years ago by bandits.

Right now, he rewards her by placing his strong chin on the crown of her head as mute reassurance. "Continue, small one."

Rin sighs, her warm mortal breath tickling the skin of Sesshomaru's bicep, and inspiring a strange and keening melancholy in the abyss where his emotions usually sleep. Softness and smallness unite with firmness and greatness as she continues her tale. Her words are still quiet but they gain boldness. "I asked the old woman how old she was. She was only sixty years old! Will I look like a prune in the sun when I am sixty, Lord Sesshomaru?"

The daiyoukai inhales sharply. He rises, and Rin topples off of his lap. For a moment tender instinct replaces his eternally cautious, calculated façade of ice, and he bends over her to right her footing. But he catches himself, like thorns snaring a soft silk robe, and withdraws.

Rin's impish round face carries all the confusion in the world. She has never experienced such aloofness from her guardian. "What did I..?"

"I do not wish to speak of this." Sesshomaru's mask is yet intact. His eyebrows are mildly knit, his eyes are hooded and coldly impassive, not a wrinkle mars his perfect alabaster skin. But his voice is tight, and his words are so rushed that they tangle as one. "Do not speak of your age. Do not speak of death. Not you. I will not discuss your death. I…I cannot. Not ever."

The child's face is devastated. Her round fingers clutch her cheeks, making delicate pink imprints. She trembles. "I have done something bad…"

Sesshomaru's fangs clench together with a vicious snap. He wants to contradict her. But something, perhaps the acidic, burning blow to his pride—admitting a weakness—erects a barrier between his will to comfort and his actions. He rivets her in place with a topaz glare, his internal conflict utterly camouflaged. In that split second, he hates that human child for making him care so very much, so very deeply, about someone besides himself.

Because now Sesshomaru has something to lose.

Someone to protect.

A reason to treasure Tenseiga—for bringing him _her_.

Rin hiccups back a sob. She stumbles to her feet, the knees of her kimono green with grass-stains, and flees. In her confusion and bewilderment, she forgets that Sesshomaru can find her wherever she goes.

Sesshomaru does not stop her. A growl creeps up his throat. He closes his eyes, into which a bloody red aura has seeped. Calm descends on him, and with that agonized clarity.

So much for the mantra "do as you wish, Rin."

For the first time in their acquaintance, Sesshomaru has issued a mandate like his father's.

Disgusting.

He has become Inu no Taisho. His mother had even said it, and she had said it in regard to Rin.

His errant, evasive, inconstant, capricious father, whom he loathes!

His fierce, undaunted, brilliant, proud, compassionate father….whom he admires most.

"For what or whom are you accountable, Sesshomaru?" The words in the youkai's memory are like the sound of icicles breaking and falling from great windy heights.

A frail and evanescent human spirit.

That is the person for whom he is accountable.

No different from his father. No different from his crass, weak half-brother.

And does he even care anymore?

No.

How disturbing.

How peculiarly satisfying.

"Lord Sesshomaru!" The unmistakable tones of the youkai's dithering, simpering servant, the toad demon Jaken, shriek through the misty air.

Sesshomaru bristles and gathers his patience about him like a swan gathers in its tailfeathers to traverse a lake. "What?" he snaps. The abruptness and coldness of his tone increases exponentially.

This is not lost on Jaken. The toad grovels expertly. "Milord, I saw the stupid worthless girl go. I will find her—do not waste your energy on such a menial task…"

Sesshomaru flares up like a white flame, rigid, claws extracted. "SHE IS NOT WORTHLESS." The words explode. Even he is taken aback by his own sudden fury.

Images of yellow blossoms, liquid drops of sun, meticulously plucked and gathered at his feet, of hair littered with leaves and brambles, of a smudged, smiling little face, one eye swollen shut, one tooth lost, of a tiny body that smells like milk and honey and soap nestled against his, overwhelm his thoughts, and Sesshomaru staggers in place.

Jaken similarly is too stunned to display a more prudent degree of fear. He gawks toothlessly at his master. "I…understand, milord…"

"No you do not. You do NOT."

"Very well, I do not…"

"She is mine to protect. You will not interfere."

"…yes, sire." The toad's eyes, yellow and unblinking, peer warily at Sesshomaru's retreating form.

The dog demon moves swiftly towards the child's form, curled up fetally in a tree hollow. He lifts her out and for the first time since he saved her life, he deliberately holds her against him in an embrace. He is surprised at how simple it is to do this, at how small she is and at how readily and warmly she clings back, her arms wrapped around his neck. He is awed at how swiftly her tears dry, how the gurgles become soft laughter into his Adam's Apple, and how that noise in her throat causes a lightness and a release inside him, and how it feels to him as great an accomplishment as slaying a previously invincible opponent in battle.

"I am sorry, Lord Sesshomaru."

"I won't forget."

There is a pause.

The child remembers a graveyard a year ago—a question she asked her master, when he saved her from a demon who ate children: "When I die, will you promise to never forget me?"

She nods. She understands.

"Don't cry, Lord Sesshomaru."

"I am not crying."

"But your eyes are so bright."

"It is not the same as tears, Rin. It is not the same as sorrow. It is something else."

"Oh." She understands again. Lord Sesshomaru never smiles. Not even when he feels great joy.

She smiles for him.

Mine.

My child.

Mine to protect and preserve as long as she wishes to trail me and shadow me.  
My responsibility. My accountability. My Self-Sufficient Reason.

Father, are you happy? My soul now has a date of expiration, because it belongs to a human—a creature who will die—and does she even know it? Will she ever know the meaning of those yellow flowers she gathers? Will she ever know that I am nearly brought to my knees now, each time I pass a human grave in a too-still, too-peaceful bamboo grove?

Or perhaps when Rin ascends to heaven…

…she will take my soul with her….

….or if it doesn't go with her, it will rise, so that it is still close to hers…  
…and I can walk with an elation hidden deep in my warrior's soul for my many centuries.

Because of her.


	2. Fishing For Papas

**Accountable **

**An InuYasha fanfiction**

By Amber C.S.

**Chapter 2: Fishing for Papas**

There is nothing in the world that Rin loves more than preparing fish for a meal with Lord Sesshomaru.

Rin fetches fish from some feral stream. Placid-faced, Lord Sesshomaru delicately, skillfully guts and cleans it, and skewers it. Lord Sesshomaru turns it over a campfire, with Rin's little hands on top of his large clawed ones. Lord Sesshomaru guards his innermost heart like a precious pearl—it is hard to reach him, to physically touch him. But Rin often still manages to find a reason. So when they are cooking their fish together, Rin pretends that she needs to guide him just so that she can hold his hands. Sometimes Lord Sesshomaru just lets her. Sometimes, if he has not seen Lord Inuyasha or thought on Naraku for many days, he is calmer, and looser. On these days he will stop turning the fish over the fire to squeeze Rin's tiny fingers, or rub them between his palms, to warm them.

And these moments remind Rin so very much of her time spent with her human father.

Her long since dead human father.

It may be her father that Rin misses most, of her entire dead family, when she allows herself to think on these dark and troubling losses.

Time spent with papa-san was rare. Rin had seven older brothers and papa-san was often most busy training them to be wise, strong, resourceful adult men. Each of those brothers teased Rin and kept her busy doing tasks usually relegated to boys, because they were an impoverished peasant family, and concerns of traditional male or female jobs were silly. Gender was nothing Rin's family had time to acknowledge when the goal was to get a certain amount of grueling tasks accomplished before the sun went down.

Rin's sole excuse to spend time with her father was doing one of these "boy" duties: fetching fish from the village preserve.

Papa-san was a big, burly, dark-haired man, blunt-faced and simple looking. Rin had inherited her impossible, untidy waves of black hair from her father. He often smelled of sweat and leather. He had nothing like the appearance of sleek, graceful, pale, clean, incense-scented Lord Sesshomaru.

But papa-san had been stoic, and quiet, and he had been gentle with Rin. They had shared hours of comfortable, pensive silence while cleaning and de-boning the fish fillets and cooking them over the fire for the whole family.

Papa-san would let her talk ceaselessly. He would offer soft, rumbling replies that always showed that, though he was usually mute, he was paying very close attention to what she was saying.

He rarely smiled, but when he did, it was small and serene, and very warm. And if he didn't smile, his eyes did, in this same manner.

In all these ways, papa-san had been so very much like Sesshomaru-sama is.

In her mind, Rin always calls Sesshomaru-sama "papa-sama."

But she is shy of speaking this title out loud.

Sometimes she mumbles it, or says it without speaking, her lips forming the title, when she is prancing in the wild woods of Japan after her lord and his servant Jaken. She whispers it to Sesshomaru-sama's back, and giggles to herself, much to Jaken-sama's irritation. "QUIET, human girl!" the toad shrills, and Rin's hands impishly flying up to cover her mouth, at this wonderful thing that Sesshomaru-sama has become to her. Her beautiful secret.

Rin does not realize that Sesshomaru-sama can hear her muffled giggles. That his stoic soul is stirred, silently, in her playfulness, her jubilance, at every small delight that a day presents. That he is awed at her joy and hopefulness, such a small, fragile, transient thing as a human child. That part of the great Lord of the Western Lands thinks this is the most profound kind of strength, and determination, a living creature can possess. That he cherishes her—that there is an invisible cord between their two hearts and to see even a single bruise on her face causes that cord to constrict painfully. And that the thought of losing her…of that cord snapping…

But Rin does not know any of these things. Heavy things, which Sesshomaru keeps from her. Rin must not know how much he loves her, not right now, because along with knowing how much he loves her comes the reason for why that love is painful—he will lose her someday. He will lose his irreplaceable….

Rin does not know that in Sesshomaru's mind, he calls her "daughter." And has, for a long time. And always will. And that when he speaks her name, when he says, "Rin," in that way that it rolls off his tongue quietly and factually and gently, as if to say "the sun is rising," or "my favorite thing," or "I love you," that word is one and the same as the word "daughter." And always will be.

But neither knows what the other thinks. Not in this sole case. Not yet. Even though they are devoted to each other.

It is because fishing was what Rin did with her own father—that is why Rin fetched a meal of fish for Lord Sesshomaru when she first met him, wounded by his little brother, in the woods. When he looked right at her, lying there, forgetting his own wracking pain, as if she truly mattered, and asked her, "Where did you get those bruises?"

The first person in an entire miserable, frightening, lonely year after her family's death, who actually cared about Rin's existence.

He had become her father already, in that moment—her father, and mother, and all her brothers—and so she had gotten fish for him.

It was really that simple.

And when they prepare fish over a campfire, Rin feels as if she has regained a shard of her security, and safety, and family. Rin talks and talks, and Sesshomaru's eyes smile as he listens. He rarely says more than a handful of words in reply. But he lets her sit in his lap, and he pulls brambles and twigs out of her hair. Sometimes he is quite talkative, in his thoughtful and vague way. And Rin feels as if behind that blank mask which constricts her lord, he is not so distant at all. Lord Sesshomaru rarely looks people in the eye, even when he addresses them, or when they are fighting him.

But he always looks right into Rin's eyes when she speaks to him.

And when she has eaten until the belt of her yukata feels snug, Rin puts her head against her secret papa-sama's chest, and drifts to sleep to the sound of his powerful, insistent heartbeat.

Hours later, no matter how stiff his position, Lord Sesshomaru will not have moved to disturb his secret daughter.

Sometimes when Rin burrows against his mokomoko and a secure smile crosses her round face, Sesshomaru's mask dissolves and he gazes down at her with an expression of open love, and, simultaneously, pain. Once or twice, his eyes are very bright. But they never fully dampen. Sesshomaru can't cry, even when he feels the agonizing urge to do so.

One night, after Rin has eaten too much and has a bellyache, she climbs into Sesshomaru's arms, trying bravely not to cry. Sesshomaru says nothing, but cradles her under his right arm like she is an infant. "I am here," is all the daiyoukai says. But that is all it takes to soothe Rin to sleep. Her bellyache gives her nightmares of wolves and dark things that try to scratch and cut you from fiery shadows. She whimpers and rolls onto her back. Sesshomaru, knowing nothing of a human's physical complaints, strokes her hair, and watches her, waits for her to ease back into repose, willing her wellness with all his powerful being. Even as she does, that rare expression of adoration and agony slowly seeps into his robotic features, giving his glazed topaz eyes a keenness they rarely possess. "Ah, Rin," he breathes. And again, "I am here." He grinds his fangs behind his lip, frustrated, never having been a master of words. And finally, "My Rin." But even that doesn't quite describe it. Nothing ever quite sufficiently does.

Jaken-sama watches from a distance of ten feet, warming his webbed hands by the campfire. Resentment and devotion struggle on his wrinkled little green face. In his large yellow orbs of eyes, the latter sentiment finally wins. "No one could compete with that," he croaks to himself, relinquishing the fight he has self-imposed between himself and that human girl for Sesshomaru-sama's favor. He resettles the Staff of Two Heads between his arms. "Methinks it amazing a love that huge isn't palpable."

But it is.

"Papa--!" Rin wails this, half-asleep, into Sesshomaru's kimono, as visions of bloody-fanged wolves flood her head. Her little limbs stiffen, seizing at his arm.

That invisible cord between their two hearts tightens and nearly snaps. Sesshomaru actually utters a soft grunt at the sensation. He pulls Rin up against his chest, under his chin, and cradles her. It is easier the second time. Just like when he found her in the woods in the knothole of a dead tree, the last time she was crying. "Hai," he mutters in her small ear, the longsuffering mask of blankness flung back up over his face. He glares around savagely at the dark forest floor, past Jaken, as though challenging the ghosts of the child's nightmares to battle. None come. Wise phantasms.

"Hai," Rin parrots, around tears, into his neck. Then, "My tummy hurts worse, Sesshomaru-sama."

"I know," the daiyoukai murmurs. His head rings with the memory of being called papa before, and only Sesshomaru-sama again now. Only? What is he thinking? He does not mention it to her now. "But I am here."

"What if I throw up?"

"Then I am here," he rumbles. "I will clean you and give you water. I am here."

"What if I throw up a hundred times?"

"Then I will clean you and give you water a hundred times. I am here."

"…Hai," Rin says again. "You are…here…" And then she falls back asleep, and does not stir again till morning.

Sesshomaru does not move. Not an inch, all night, like always. His face is more forcefully empty, and stoic, than it ever was before. That blankness itself becomes a facial expression all its own.

Something about that particular night, and that particular event, seems different to Jaken. In any case, it's the first time the toad demon has himself been moved to tears since Rin's second near-death experience, at the home of Sesshomaru's mother—sniveling quietly, turning away from the other two to hide that he is moved. It is the larger implication, vaguely beginning to occur to the little youkai, now, that brings tears: in what dreadful, profound ways might Sesshomaru-sama be destroyed, if Rin died a third time—for good?


	3. Daughter

**Accountable **

**An InuYasha fanfiction **

By Amber C.S.

**Chapter 3: Daughter**

**(Before Bakusaiga) **

Sesshomaru isn't quite sure of how the transformation of his own character came to pass, so fully and irrevocably.

But he does recall the precise moment when he realized he loved Rin as if she were his own child. Before that she had been a curiosity, a tolerated presence, a precious object, a living pet in his itinerant group, finally an extension of himself. And then, at last, she became his daughter. The most important living thing in his world.

It had been an incident over a meal of fish, again. Almost a year before he regrew his arm and obtained Bakusaiga.

There were bandits on the road by their camp. Jaken had neglected to put out the fire properly, and the smoke attracted them straight to Sesshomaru's party.

Sesshomaru had just experienced another extensive run-in with his little brother, Inuyasha, whom he continues to swear is in some obscure fashion developmentally handicapped.

Particularly in the brain capacity.

He was, therefore, irritated, exhausted, and feeling the heat of his father's spurning rejection fresh, as he always did when he encountered the clumsy, obnoxious young Inuyasha, toussan's unquestioned favorite. Inuyasha, the bastard son, whose name, their father's dying wish on the battlefield, literally means "demon bitch." Apparently old Inu no Taisho did have some sort of warped sense of humor, after all. Or perhaps he was just going for something a bit less melodramatic than his eldest son's name, which means "deadly perfection." Who in hell knew? At any rate, both of their names were peculiarly well suited.

At least this is Sesshomaru's distinguished opinion.

The incident which Sesshomaru recalls fondly, however, was Rin's surprisingly astute, sensitive handling of a situation which might have otherwise resulted in disgrace and dishonor.

The bandits who had seen the campfire came upon Sesshomaru attempting to eat his fish fillet one-handed.

Never had Sesshomaru felt the stigma of a cripple before—his extraordinary self-confidence had ruled out such a self-perception even as blood still gushed from the stump where dear Inuyasha, using Tessaiga, had severed his arm. But with one arm, he had more difficulty with tasks that didn't involve a sword than he would ever admit—chopping and carrying firewood, taking a piss, getting his hair out of his face, eating, and the like. It was just that his endurance and stoicism made up for what was lacking.

Yet, as the dirty eyes of even dirtier, dung-and mud-covered human peasants fell on him sitting in a yogi pose, chopping a dagger one-handedly and with a plodding but self-sufficient air in his meat….as, in that moment, the knife slipped out of his hand and onto the ground, and the strangers roared with laughter…. in that moment, Sesshomaru, Lord of the Western Lands, felt hotness in his porcelain, magenta-streaked cheeks. His ore-colored eyes burned as he took in the bandits, standing in a circle around him, sniggering and gesturing with their crude weapons at the pretty, pompous one-armed man who couldn't even cut his own meat.

No one would ever know. He could kill them easily. No one who mattered would ever know. Not Naraku and his incarnations, not the little brother whom he grudgingly protected, in their father's memory. He could kill them with one slash of his Poison Claws, which already hummed a lurid green. But the shame would already be there, the shame of being ridiculed by a bunch of filthy human commoners, and would stay affixed to his proud spirit like a brand…

And that was the moment when Rin walked calmly into the clearing, carrying a cloth on which reposed a neatly cut fish fillet. "Sesshomaru-sama," the little girl chirped, twirling once in a circle and handing over the meat to her horrified guardian. "Thank you for cutting my fish for me, but I don't want it." At that moment, her little stomach growled.

Though his mask never once slipped, Sesshomaru forgot to breathe for a split second.

He wasn't sure whether she was doing what he thought she was doing, but if she was…

The bandits fell silent, shocked by the presence of a child, and even more shocked by the epiphany that she, at age eight, had tactfully planted. They stepped back from the one-armed man, strangely abashed.

Sesshomaru drew himself upright. His voice was like a gentle roll of thunder. "Rin, you must eat your dinner in order to keep up your strength. Go do so." He looked directly into those large, bright cherrywood eyes, and then he smiled at the little girl who had saved his pride—and by facing down bandits, the same lot of people who had killed her family, no less.

That was the moment that Rin became Sesshomaru's daughter. He could not conceive of another child on earth, human or youkai, whom he would more proudly claim as his own.

Rin produced a gleeful grin in response. She relished her victory, and her loyalty to her guardian. She danced back behind the tree where she and Jaken were eating. She devoured the fish fillet that she had claimed to not want. Jaken could be heard complaining shrilly of her poor table manners.

Sesshomaru arched an eyebrow at the interlopers, who were backing away. His Poison Claw regenerated in his fingers. "Do you think that this Sesshomaru-sama, the great daiyoukai, is incapable of trivia? You will know better hereafter. Leave before I kill you all."

The bandits readily complied.

Sesshomaru wasted no time in standing. He passed the dagger which he had dropped in the dirt, and glided behind the tree to greet his charges. He bent to Rin's level—an act to which he rarely resorted. He patted the child's cheek, puffed out comically with fishmeat that she was happily chewing. And then he said something that he almost never said, not to anyone: "Arigato. Arigato, Rin. You are an uncommonly smart child."

Rin nodded and giggled, accidentally spitting out bits of fish. As Jaken's dearth of luck would have it, these regurgitated bits of meat struck the hapless toad youkai in the face. He sputtered and fumed.

Rin clapped her hands over her mouth, exaggerated chagrin replacing her cheer. "Gomenasai, Jaken-sama.." she began.

But she was interrupted by a short bark of laughter from Sesshomaru—that peculiar "HOH" sound he made, a roar of mirth without smiling, which came and went so fleetingly that it always seemed to surprise Sesshomaru himself. Indeed, once the noise was past, he blinked, and then shook his head. "Jaken will be fine. But cover your mouth."

Jaken looked sour and sulky.

Rin giggled again, hands still firmly clasped over her mouth. She swallowed with a satisfied "ahhh" sound, and then wrapped both her arms around Sesshomaru's extended right hand.

His daughter, Rin.

"I am glad it worked, Sesshomaru-sama," she chirped.

Oh, it worked. Sublimely. Her presence in his life worked. There was no question of that, now.

"Hai," Sesshomaru blankly retorted, but then he reached a few fingers down to tickle her nearest armpit.

The child shrieked with laughter, wriggling out of reach. "Sesshomaru-sama!" she protested gleefully, and then with the delightful incongruity of a happy child's mind, she added, "Aishiteru, Sesshomaru-sama!" Shyly she hid her face in his kimono sleeve, still bursting with giggles.

Sesshomaru went still as death, but his eyes softened. "Hai," he said again.

Jaken just glared.


	4. Snow Covered

**Accountable **

**An InuYasha fanfiction **

By Amber C.S.

**Chapter 4: Snow-Covered**

**(After Bakusaiga)**

Snow. Everywhere. Hanging over the trees like thick mountaintops. Covering everything, suffocating everything. Like the night his father died. Like the night his father asked him if he had someone, something, to protect.

Snow. Everywhere. The day Sesshomaru, as a child Rin's age, was asked to perform his first tea ceremony with fellow children of the aristocracy. Sesshomaru had failed, because he had been anxious about meeting the eyes of the other children when they conversed. He had been jarred by their penetrating, openly warm gazes, their desire not to stand out, but to fellowship, to be interdependent, to be together and in intimate communication. He did not understand why they needed these things, but even more, he did not understand why he did NOT need these things. And never had.

Sesshomaru decided as a young boy that he would be an isolated being. That solitude would be a marker of his outstanding character—solitude and uncanny excellence, superiority, would be forced to become one and the same. He knew he already stood out, was strange, because he hated meeting the eyes of others, because he was afraid of his emotions, because he lost control of himself and his conduct when he felt anything.

Because a mask was safer—an eternally cold, blank mask.

Because when he felt emotions, he also felt a disconnection between those emotions and what came across his face, or what tint there was to his voice. He could never express what he was feeling. Never. He failed at it. Miserably. And the Lord of the Western Lands despised failure.

For this reason his father never knew what to do with him—tried hard, forced him to speak back to those who addressed him, attempted to have Sesshomaru form fond attachments, with toys, with pets, with peers. None of it seemed to work. And Inu no Taisho scratched the back of his neck awkwardly, and reported these eccentricities back to Sesshomaru's mother, while their son just sat there glazed, staring at their hands, their eyebrows, their ears, the wall—anywhere but their eyes. Inu no Taisho laughed it off when allies and fellow noblemen remarked upon the blankness of his firstborn son, his heir. But there was loving despair in that laugh.

So Sesshomaru, the boy, failed.

And at his first tea ceremony, he spilled broiling hot green tea on a little girl his age, because she had touched his hand and smiled at him. The girl screamed and sobbed. And the eight-year-old Sesshomaru, terrified of this mistake, had risen and fled the tea ceremony.

Disgrace. Disgrace like thick white snow, perfect. He wanted to stomp it all to bits. So as a little boy, with snow everywhere outside his father and mother's grand western palace, he had cried and thrown up on the whiteness, and dug around in it, and stepped on it, to destroy that perfection that was part of his very name, that mocked him, and made him separate…at the same time that he had embraced that damned separation as the very signifier of his being.

Cold snow everywhere, a cold mask always.

That was the last time Sesshomaru cried. The very last time.

Inuyasha can cry, and laugh at whim.

Inuyasha looks at people and his face is a fresh and open book, a fan unfurled with all its designs plain to see.

Inuyasha is transparent and caring, Inuyasha wants to be part and parcel of things, and events, and feelings.

So Inu no Taisho found it easier to love his younger son, his bastard "demon bitch." Inu no Taisho siphoned off his older son, the "killing perfection," as the grudging protector for the favored son.

Or at least this is how Sesshomaru sees it.

The primary sword for the normal son, the sword cast off the first Fang, a secondary sword, excess matter, unneeded, for the freak son, the robot, the icy stone, who feels but can and will not let anyone know it.

Sesshomaru has Bakusaiga now, and has long since given up craving Tessaiga. He has surpassed his father, and his brother, as a great demon warrior.

But that ultimate disavowal by their father…that confirmation, after all, that Sesshomaru is a beloved disappointment whom Inu no Taisho still tolerated and was gentle with…THAT is what still stings.

But Sesshomaru will be damned if anyone ever knows it.

Today there is snow on the ground everywhere. Like when he was a little boy and afraid of perfection which he could never match. Like when he was a teenager and saw his father for the last time, before Inu no Taisho went to rescue his human whore and favored son…

Rin is playing in it. Playing in the snow. Squealing, rolling around, flinging snowballs at Jaken, who squawks in protest but indulges her all the same.

Rin is playing in the cold snow, Rin is threatening to crumble the cold mask. Rin is the first time there has been a reason to let that mask down. Sesshomaru hates and loves this fact all at once.

Sesshomaru sits under a tree, on a ledge overlooking a tufted white ravine, rigid, impassive, one leg drawn to his chest, the other stretched out. He hears every huffing breath, every step, every giggle of his ward. That cord between his chest and Rin's wriggles and flutters in a pleasant, soft way.

It must be what fondness feels like. What his father could never accomplish, a little human girl has.

He betrays none of his observations outwardly.

A warm little body clambers into his lap. Several moments pass before it occurs to him to look down into the face of his addresser. He peers at Rin. She is sitting exactly like him, mimicking his posture.

Her face horrifies him.

She is trying to look blank, and dead. Dead like him. Her cheeks flush red with the effort not to blink or smile.

"Rin, stop that." Sesshomaru hears his voice and doesn't recognize it—strained, quiet, and coarse. "Stop making that face. Now."

"I am just trying to be like Sesshomaru-sama," the child explains, and then her face cracks into an exquisite, dopey grin. She giggles, and flails up her arms. "I have failed! Hehe!"

His chest feels tremendously pressured at this sight, and he is not quite sure why, but the pressure is not unpleasant. It's more like relief. And a part of him, in the back of his mind, wonders how often his father was waiting to see that same look on his own face…

No. It is not Rin who has failed.

"This Sesshomaru does not wish for Rin to mimic him in that way," he rumbles.

"Hai, I noticed, milord. I will not do that ever again, I promise." The child slides out both legs, pressing her tiny wet feet against his stomach companionably. She wriggles her toes, wincing—they are cold and blotchy from trekking for hours in the snow. The damned suffocating snow. "But how come you feel like freezing yourself all the time? Your face is frozen. Rin knows what milord feels for real. But I wonder why he does this. It must tire milord. Owch." She reaches forward to rub her toes, and warm them.

Sesshomaru whets his lips. This is not the first time that Rin's remarkable perceptiveness has shocked him. But it doesn't take away the startling edge of her next attack of intuition.

His topaz eyes slide down to Rin's feet. "I am not frozen." Her metaphorical use of the word is not lost on him, but he is deliberately changing the subject. He places his large warm hand over her toes, and her hands on her toes. "But your feet are most definitely frozen. Come. They will get frostbite at this rate. We must relegate you to a warm interior, until this snowstorm passes. Hold on." He wraps mokomoko, with its many folds of thick white fur, around her feet, and stands.

The child says nothing, but nestles her messy brown head under her guardian's chin. After a moment, she speaks. "I am sorry I cannot pick flowers for Sesshomaru-sama. They are buried in all the snow."

"There is no need to apologize. Jaken, come." Sesshomaru gestures imperiously at his manservant, who hastens after the two, ploughing through the snowbanks with the Staff of Two Heads.

"Does Sesshomaru-sama ever play?" Rin's cheek rests against the daiyoukai's Adam's Apple. It is warm and alive, and it makes Sesshomaru feel oddly calm and content, this small person's utter reliance upon him.

"No," is all he says outloud. His chest constricts, the pressure in it becoming heavy in a choking way, at how there is such incongruity between his sentiments and his words…yet how unbridgeable that gap is. Like it always has been.

"Will milord play with Rin?" The child tries to ask it in a wheedling way. It just comes out sounding cutely puckish.

"Perhaps," Sesshomaru replies, employing his usual honesty with the child.

"I am a butterfly!" Rin bursts out, flapping her floppy yukata-sleeved arms. "Even the snow will not freeze me! For I am perched on a big warm doggie!"

"That is fortunate. Rest your wings now, butterfly." Sesshomaru waits patiently for her to stop flinging about and several times nearly striking him on the jaw. He realizes, after the fact, how tender are the words he just spoke. He is glad for the excuse of windburn, for his cheeks and pointed ears turn a faded pink.

"Play with me, Sesshomaru-sama!"

"Woof," Sesshomaru remarks dryly. "Arf, arf, grrr, et cetera. There, was that sufficient?"

"Hai," the child yawns, apparently appeased. She leans into him again, as they approach a cluster of familiar huts. The old miko Kaede's village.

"Jaken," Sesshomaru murmurs, "go inside and fetch Kaede-san."

"Aye, milord." The aged toad demon places a hand on his stiff back and waddles into the largest central hut.

He returns shortly, shrieking and flailing his wrinkled green arms, with old Kaede on his heels and an arrow aimed at his head.

Sesshomaru's lip twitches. His eyes twinkle just slightly. "Hmph," he says.

"Be careful, Jaken-sama," Rin calls out in a voice thickened by sleepiness.

The elderly woman's eyes, bright despite her years, turn sharply on the daiyoukai and his child. "Here now," she croaks, "think ye that thy manservant can just barge in on an old woman after dark? What's all this about?"

"Lower your weapon and you will know," Sesshomaru growls, turning discretely so that the arrow, if it is released from its shaft, will strike him, and not the child he holds.

"Aye," Kaede complies, noticing the bloody, feral tint seeping into his eye whites. "Peace, Lord Sesshomaru. I beseech ye, come closer. But if thy brother be sought, he is not here right now. He went to fetch Kagome-chan, and will return sometime in the morning."

"I have no interest in dealing with Inuyasha at the present time. It is the comfort of my ward that motivates me now." Sesshomaru's eyes cool and pale back to their normal hue. He carries Rin, now fast asleep, over to the threshold of the hut. The warm glow of a fire beckons enticingly. "Take her for the night, until this snowstorm passes. I will retrieve her and depart in the morning. Heed me, old woman, and obey. I do not have time for games."

"There be no need to order me around like thy royal washerwoman, boy," Kaede feistily retorts.

Jaken sputters out some loyal protest against her disrespectful lip.

"Quiet, Jaken," Sesshomaru hisses. "It seems that if we antagonize the hag, she will turn down the needs of a child of her own race."

"Hardly," Kaede snaps. "Think ye that I do not see thy love for the child, or that I have not the heart to take in such a small and needy creature upon first sight?"

Sesshomaru stiffens. "Take her," is all he says, somewhat harshly, handing the limp and slumbering body of Rin to the old miko. His eyes train on Rin's face, and then on Kaede's. Youthful, aged, unblemished, decaying with wrinkles. In a mere blink of an eye. A mere sixty or so years. He will look no different, feel no different, when Rin is a prune like this old creature. How? "I will be waiting outside." A muscle in his jaw grinds, and his fists tighten at his sides. He crackles the joints in his fingers menacingly and turns to step outside the door, into the snow, into the suffocating snow. Into that reminder of failure. Another failure: he is powerless to save Rin from death. Utterly impotent.

"Does it pain thee so much, Sesshomaru?" comes Kaede's sly but empathetic voice, to his back.

"What?" he demands, whirling around. His fangs clench together. He realizes how much he sounds like his father, in the way he commands an answer.

"Think ye that thy ward's life to thine own is comparable to a moth's life and a human's?"

"That is none of your business," he breathes. Why is he whispering, and not shouting? He does not know what possesses him. But he realizes that his words, his face, and his innermost feelings, are all in communion right now. For the first time, there is no gap. How?

"It is no reason to keep her at arm's length. Cherish her."

"Shut your mouth, impudent bitch." Sesshomaru's right hand flies to the hilt of Tenseiga, which pulses, sealing and soothing the demon that wants to come out and destroy Kaede.

"Aye, and that is the weapon that ye can thank for thy greatest treasure." Kaede puts that treasure down in front of the fire, layering many blankets on top of little Rin. "Methinks thy name is poorly suited these days, Sesshomaru."

"Do not speak nonsense. I am Sesshomaru and no one else."

Kaede rubs Rin's feet, then stands laboriously. She puts water over the fire to boil for tea. "Hai, but now a better name for thee would not be 'killing perfection.' Twould be 'life-giving perfection,' compassionate one. Is it not so, little youkai?" She turns to Jaken.

Jaken's yellow orbs of eyes shift uncomfortably between Kaede and Sesshomaru. It is blatant that he agrees with Kaede, but does not have the courage to say so. "Er, I'm sorry, what?" He transparently dodges the question.

Sesshomaru's eyes narrow. "Do not overestimate my kindness, either of you. I am Sesshomaru. Old woman, take care of Rin. I will stand watch until the morning."

"Thy daughter is safe with me, great dog demon," Kaede reassures him, with that sly old smile.

…Daughter….

…Did he say that word? He is sure that he did not say it out loud…

Sesshomaru blinks. "…Jaken, stay inside with these two." And he steps out into the snow.

Like a moth to a human…

Perfect but transient.

Damn.

He gazes around at the landscape. All is the same. All is monotonously white. Blank. Like him.

Rin. What can he do for Rin? What can he give her? His chest feels heavier still.

Rin, Rin. Perfect little Rin.

She had apologized for not fetching him flowers in the snow. Ah, Rin.

Sesshomaru remembers seeing something amazing on their walk to Kaede's hut, too preoccupied to stop and observe it. But he will find it now. He takes flight at a devastatingly swift pace. He hurls himself at the white landscape, nose tracking.

Hours pass before he comes upon it: still alive, a perfect, tiny white flower blossoming in the snow near a cliff. The very air around that flower seems still, serene, otherworldly. For Rin, it is just the gift. He will pick Rin a flower.

Sesshomaru bends and plucks the thing. He reminds himself to be delicate with it. He takes off for the village.

It is not morning yet, but Sesshomaru enters Kaede's hut without announcing himself.

Rin is curled up in front of the fire, Jaken seated about five paces from her, slouched against the stone fireplace sleeping as well. Kaede stands in the next room mixing herbs for more tea.

Sesshomaru kneels down over Rin's slumbering form. He slips the perfect white flower into her round, tiny hand. "For you," he says.

The child rolls over against his leg. She smiles. Her eyes drift lazily open, and she is not fully awake, or asleep, when she slurs, "Papa-sama, the wolves are gone now. Arigato."

Sesshomaru's brow furls. But he is not displeased with her. "Hai."

Daughter.

He does not know why he does it. But he does it just the same. He leans down, cascades of silver hair curtaining both their faces. And he rests his lips against Rin's forehead. He does not know what he is supposed to do after this impulse has seized him. So the Lord of the Western Lands, the scion of grace and lethal efficiency, remains bent over the human child with his lips clumsily pressed against her forehead, for several minutes. When his back feels stiff, he straightens. He looks around almost shiftily. No witnesses.

So he stands and walks back outside, to keep watch for the things he protects.

But he does not feel cold anymore.


	5. Errors in Judgment

**Accountable **

**An InuYasha fanfiction**

By Amber C.S.

**Chapter 5: Errors in Judgment**

Sesshomaru hates the smell of jasmine. It's that Other Woman's smell. From a young age, he began to wipe oil of incense, even myrrh, that embalming death-oil that merchants brought from just west of the Chinese mainland, on his arms, just to get rid of the stink of the Other Woman so blatantly hanging on his father.

How long did Inu no Taisho think he could hide his errant behavior, before his son knew? Before his wife knew? And how long did Sesshomaru's mother know, and hold her shaken pride together, and not reveal a moment of betrayal or sorrow?

Sesshomaru had always felt indifferent to humans, until the day he first came upon his father with that stench of jasmine all over his clothes, saw his father's kimono hanging disheveled off one shoulder and nearly untied at the waist, and simply _knew_. In that moment, he began to truly hate that fragile, mortal, useless race.

Until Rin. But he doesn't think on Rin right now. She is such an uncomfortable exception to every rigid rule and principle that Sesshomaru has upheld for himself. Rin is different—Rin did not take from him, she gave to him, and still does. She poured water on his face and gave him fish when he lay bleeding under a canopy of trees. Where the first human Sesshomaru met cut out a piece of his heart and stole away his father's attentions, and destroyed the union of his household, Rin lays her head against his chest and counts the beat of that half-severed heart as more than sufficient—as magnificent and beloved. Where the mother's replacement, the "Lady" Izayoi, bereaved Sesshomaru, the daughter, Rin, heals him. Life is give-and-take, strangely cyclical.

But Sesshomaru does not think on these things while he stands like a stone centurion, legs straddled, blocking and guarding the doorway to Kaede's hut, where Rin sleeps. Guarding Rin herself from snow and foe.

No, Sesshomaru does not ruminate at all upon the night he confronted his father about his unfaithfulness—about how that confrontation only confirmed to him that he was always someone whom the great demon Inu no Taisho loved but could not understand, and was, ultimately, exasperated with.

Not at all.

Not for one moment.

Not in excruciating detail.

"Where did you meet the whore?" His voice, when he asked the question, as a boy of sixteen demon years—Inuyasha's age to this day, exactly—was no different than it is now. If anything, it was even blander, even more of a monotone, than it is now.

"I know no whore," Inu no Taisho had rumbled in response, in his boisterous booming baritone—so much like Sesshomaru's own voice, were it ever colored with emotion.

Sesshomaru's posture had gone quite stiff. Fists formed at his sides. The strange patricidal urge to slice his father's throat open with his Poison Claws, the very tactic his father had taught him for long hours of training and bonding as a boy…oh it broiled barely controlled beneath the surface, that urge to betray his betrayer right back. "Liar. I smell her filthy stench all over your pores and your clothing. You taught me how to smell out enemies. Well I have."

"Oh, Sesshomaru. Don't do this."

"I? I! Perhaps YOU should not 'do this,' toussan. Never presume to 'educate' me in the ways of life again. I would never be so dishonorable to my woman. Nor my son. Nor myself."

Inu no Taisho sighed and sat down in the middle of a vast forest encapsulated in the lavish Inu Clan Estate, below the level of his son's eyes, submitting himself remorsefully to scorn.

Who cared? Too little, too late.

Nevertheless the father spoke. "Let me try and explain. I realize I have breeched your trust beyond excuse…"

"So the old dog still has some judgment and wisdom about him," Sesshomaru had cruelly cut in.

He deserved it. Father deserved it. His hero and his measure for all things, the one he was destined to engage in combat and overcome, a crucial rite of passage into his own autonomy and manhood…reduced to a sighing old fraud, seated on a rock in the middle of the fukai mori.

Inexcusable. Unforgivable.

"Sesshomaru, try to hear me out. Is this really so astounding to you? My boy, you are not naïve, but clever, and experienced, for your age. Already you have satisfied yourself with girls. It is not just the way of the bachelor prince, my son. Many noblemen who sit at our dinner tables and teas have gone astray of their wives..."

"You are not 'many noblemen,' father. You were above them in my eyes. Above them all."

"Sesshomaru, my son, I know that I have always been lofty and mighty in your eyes, to a rigidly…schematized, idealized extent, my boy, but…"

"So you would settle now for a view of yourself as a nothing, a commoner, with no personal restraint, a hedonistic emotional nobody, and you would reduce this woman with whom you have cuckolded my honored mother to a whore by her complicity in your unfaithfulness. You have dishonored yourself and your dear lover."

Inu no Taisho looks up earnestly into his son's eyes. His face is a mirror of Sesshomaru's, barely weathered with his great age, the only difference being the greater length of his hair, and the greater thickness of his eyebrows, and one, not two, magenta streak on each cheek. Sesshomaru loathes that they could almost be twins as his father confesses: "Your mother knows already. And has for some time."

"But you betrayed her first!"

"Hai. I did. And I will not say that what I did is worthy of honor. But it is also your mother's intention to take a lover, aside me. We are to be divorced before the winter. In a few weeks' time, in fact."

"She has found no one. I smell no foreign man on my mother. You will leave her alone, heartlessly and selfishly, you bastard, you fraud…"

"Sesshomaru…"

"And this is why I have always known that solitude is superior to camaraderie. One is left alone in the end, anyway."

"Sesshomaru, do not draw such conclusions from this event…you must always seek to answer this question, son: For whom or what are you accountable?"

"Myself. ONLY myself."

"No, boy. That is insufficient. Try and remember what I have taught you…"  
"You have taught me nothing! NOTHING!" The son's eyes became hot and wet and yet no tears would ever come. Never since he was a child humiliated by a failed tea ceremony. "YOU WISH TO PUNISH ME AND ABANDON ME BECAUSE I AM NOT YOU. YOU WISH FOR ANOTHER HEIR, IS THAT IT? ONE WHO CAN SMILE AND LAUGH LIKE A STUPID APE, LIKE YOU! ONE WHO LIKES TO BE SMOTHERED, NEVER LEFT TO WANDER!" All was red and unclear, as he let himself submit to the emotions which he so scorned in his father as weaknesses. He gyrated around in place, like a spinning top. His fists flew in front of him, claws opening, reaching, itching to strangle the man sitting below his level. "I HAVE NEVER BEEN WHAT YOU WANT. ALWAYS INSUFFICIENT! YOU SEEK A 'BETTER' HEIR! WELL IS THIS FEELING ENOUGH, FATHER? IS THIS FEELING ENOUGH—THIS UNDIGNIFIED TANTRUM?" As though epileptic, he fitfully twitched, the blank mask of his face losing a battle to an expression of open, feral fury. His visage contorted, half changing to the elongated dog muzzle of his true form. Snarl lines marred his beautiful countenance.

Several expressions crossed Inu no Taisho's face. Chief among them were guilt, conflict, and sorrow. "Sesshomaru…" He reached a strong supportive hand towards his child.

"WHO IS SHE?" Sesshomaru smacked it away.

"Please forgive me. Please. I will give no more justifications for what has happened. But I love her. Please forgive your father, who loves you, too."

"I SAID WHO IS SHE? WHO IS THE WHORE THAT YOU FUCKED LIKE A SKULKING ASHAMED ANIMAL? AND WHAT WILL HAPPEN, FATHER, IF YOU GET HER PREGNANT? WHAT THEN?"

"She already is."

The world reeled.

Sesshomaru took a step forward, a step back.

His hands flung up to each side of his face. The nails dug into his cheeks, the pain leveling him, keeping him from going farther, from slaying his own father, at this last and most ultimate of betrayals: So he WAS being usurped by a younger, "better" heir after all.

Fine…fine. To hell with it. All of it. To hell with anything, anyone, but himself.

Slowly his face changed back to a fully human form, and yet his eyes remained red, and his voice loud and raw. A plaintive growl, almost a moan, escaped him. "She…is already?"

"You will not harm her. Sesshomaru, I know how you behave when you get this way. I know it is why you try to keep your emotions bottled. But I will not let even my own son harm her. Especially not when she is with child. It will be born at spring thaw."

Sesshomaru let out a loud, forced scoff. "HMPH! What difference would it make if I did something as POINTLESS as THAT? No, your whore is safe. I only want to know her NAME." He felt blood trickling down his cheeks, from his own dug-in nails, as he spoke. Tasted it as it drizzled down his chin. But he was unfazed again. Catatonic again.  
"Her name is Izayoi."

"Keh. Father, at least give me an honest answer for the mother of your beloved child. I know no youkai noblewomen with that name."

"She is not a youkai."

"…What?" Sesshomaru's hands dropped to his sides. He saw something in his father's belt, made of paper, folded, sticking out. A beautiful fan, with the honeycomb pattern of the Inu Clan on the edge…meeting some floral pattern of an alien dynasty, and interweaving with it. "Ah, I see. This is for her?" He rips the fan out of his father's belt, and sticks it in his own. "She may not have it. This hated son Sesshomaru forbids it. She has offended me gravely by BREATHING. Not a youkai, you say? Then what is she, a beast?"

"She is a human….Sesshomaru, you are beloved of me as well. Sesshomaru, why will you not look at my eyes? Sesshomaru. Please."

"You have just contradicted yourself with your own last words. I will never look on a human in love. It is a human you used to betray me. So neither will I look on you, mighty warrior, dear father."

"Love is not so discriminating as you might think, my child. Love will happen when it wishes to happen. It is stronger than any warrior. That is why it is essential in your Path of Supreme Conquest. That is why I ask you for whom you are accountable…"

"You are wrong, father. I shall never love a human. In fact, I shall never love."

Such irony in the words of the past. Words to be eaten.

Because of Rin.

"_You have become much like your father in strange ways, Sesshomaru_." His mother's words, only a year ago. His mother, betrayed by humans, like himself—recognizing his love for the human girl who had become his child.

Sesshomaru still has the fan meant for Izayoi. He will never let Inuyasha see it. Never. He will keep it as his revenge, deny his brother the right to have evidence of the conjugal love of Inu no Taisho and the human whore. He slides his hand into his yellow and blue hued belt. Feels that fan protruding out of the side, yet safely hidden. He does not know how long he will carry it with him before he destroys it—but it will never reach Inuyasha's hands.

"What the hell are YOU doin' here?"

Speak of the devil.

Sesshomaru's eyes almost turn red as they did so many years ago towards his father, when the voice of the preferred son, the evidence of his father's betrayal, floods his ears. Ever so slowly, his eyes flicker to the side and down, at his shorter, smaller half-brother. Half-demon. Half-brainless. Half-everything.

And yet…

Sesshomaru swore to protect Inuyasha on his father's grave. The words he flung at Inu no Taisho would never have been so heated, so agonized, if hate were the only feeling he had towards his father. And so even at his moments of greatest loathing for Inuyasha, Sesshomaru worries over his brother, and watches over his blundersome ways, and cleans up his messes, and keeps him safe.

To Sesshomaru, Inuyasha embodies conflict itself.

"Why is it not appropriate that this Sesshomaru should ask you the same thing…otouto-kun?" He spouts the greeting with the most impossible mixture of hateful disgust and loving familiarity imaginable.

Inuyasha blinks, taken aback as ever by his older brother. As he stutters for a withering retort, his pricked dog ears flattening against his skull, his usual comrades—the miko from the future, the formerly cursed monk, the female youkai exterminator, the young fox demon, and the cat demon—trail up behind him with wary faces. "What the hell, ya mouthy bastard, we're LIVIN' here on and off now that Naraku's been defeated. You KNOW that…"

"This Sesshomaru is not the 'bastard' of the two of us, which you well know."

Inuyasha cringes and glares. "Keh," he snorts, very much the pubescent boy.

Sesshomaru gives a haughty yet throaty "hhhmmmph" as some sort of older, animalesque, masculine retort. His eyes narrow challengingly.

The exchange, fairly typical of the two brothers, would almost be funny under other circumstances.

As it is, the company of humans behind them collectively sighs.

"Could you guys just step aside and let us go inside for warmth?" The miko, Kagome, suggests, in a tone that somehow mixes meek and spunky.

"Right," adds the monk, a sexually eager fellow whom Sesshomaru has always felt is a bit of a sicko and a smart-ass. "You can grunt at each other to your hearts' content, it's just that…"

"Higurashi-san has just touched upon the reason why I am present," Sesshomaru rumbles, nodding at Kagome, who is probably the only person in that group that he can really stand for more than a few minutes at a time. It's probably because she looks and acts like he imagines Rin will in ten years. Speaking of… "My ward was getting too cold in this blizzard. I took her here for shelter. We will be leaving at dawn, or when the storm eases, whichever comes first."

Kagome's and the hunter, Sango's, eyes soften simultaneously at this paternal announcement. Miroku nods, without comment. The little fox demon Shippo, and Inuyasha, both simply blink again. Then Shippo at least blurts, "Um, sure, right!" Sesshomaru wonders if the bushy-tailed child has more brain capacity than his brother. Yes, probably.

"So get inside, then." He steps aside brusquely, expelling another "hmmmph."

It is then, as they pass by, that Inuyasha bumps into Sesshomaru—no doubt trying to knock him aside and assert his fictitious male strength—and concordantly bumps into the filched fan hidden in Sesshomaru's belt.

Sesshomaru's lips thin.

"What's that?" Inuyasha grabs the thing out before Sesshomaru can comment. "…That's the crest of my mom's family…and our dad's…what the…Sesshomaru…" Comprehension slowly dawns on the hanyou's childlike face.

Sesshomaru is sickened by it. He seizes the fan back. "It is NOT yours," he hisses, but it's not the fan he's talking about. It's bigger and more profound things of which Sesshomaru has always felt robbed—by Inuyasha and his mother.

"…Give it to me. Give me my mother's fan."  
"No."

Inuyasha is strangely somber. He draws Tessaiga, then and there. "Give it to me or I'll cut off both your arms this time."

"No."

"I'll fight you for it."

Sesshomaru smiles. "Fine," he says, as he draws Bakusaiga. He swings the frothy white mokomoko under his arm, and positions his feet, ready for battle.

Neither of them realizes that Rin has been roused by the company's entry into Kaede's hut…that Rin walked to the door, little fists rubbing her eyes, one hand still clutching the white flower her papa-sama gave her, drawn by the sound of her papa-sama's voice conversing with someone outside…that Rin now watches them drawing their swords in horror…and is ready to run into the line of fire.


	6. This Time Around

**Accountable**

** An InuYasha fanfiction**

By Amber C.S.

**Chapter 6: This Time Around **

Rin drops her perfect white flower, her gift from Sesshomaru-sama, and accidentally steps on it, withering it, crumpling it, as she pads ambivalently back and forth on her calloused little bare feet, trying to decide what to do. Rin does not hate Inuyasha-sama as Sesshomaru-sama does. She cannot, because he is the brother of the person who is her whole world. 

But Rin does not know what to do right now. Rin has never been so aware of her smallness as she is right now. Actually, she has. But it was a long long time ago. This is the first time since Sesshomaru-sama came into her life that she has felt that creeping sense of helplessness and insecurity so strongly. Usually, Sesshomaru-sama, papa-sama, is there to stand silent and tall and brave and invincible, to take it away, that awful feeling, to snatch it up and smoosh it for her. But not right now. Not right now.

Kagome-chan and Jaken-sama are arguing about who gets to sleep on the rice mats. Miroku-san and Sango-san are helping Kaede-sama to make some more tea for the influx of new guests, and Shippo-kun and Kilala-chan have already gone to sleep in front of the fire next to Ah-Un. Kohaku-kun is not here at all—he is training back home in Sango-san's rebuilt village. No one is paying attention to the fight outside but Rin. Inuyasha-sama and Sesshomaru-sama haven't gotten very loud yet. 

In fact, for some reason, they are whispering at each other.

"Guess you expect me to take the first swing as usual, huh?" Inuyasha murmurs, pacing to the left and right in front of Sesshomaru, cheeks red with anger. He swivels the enormous, curved Tessaiga effortlessly in his grasp. His skill has grown exponentially. 

"This is pointless. We have not quarreled for months. Go inside." Sesshomaru is, by contrast, pale as death. He doesn't move. Not an inch. He simply stands his ground, feet straddled firmly, Bakusaiga drawn and ready. His actions conflict with his superficially pacifistic words—or, at the very least, he refuses to drop his defensive stance. Then after a pause, almost wonderingly he adds, "Otouto-san…hoh, I really do hate you, because you never learn anything, but were born knowing what was wanted. You were favored for the knowledge that you already had, without _any_ trials at all. So I am keeping the damned fan. I am keeping it. _Something_ has to be denied you, at _some_ point. I shall _force _you to grow."

"AW, for cryin' out…as USUAL, you're not makin' SENSE, yer HIGHNESS! And anyway, how the HELL have YOU grown over the last years, EH? YOU'RE the one who said we'd be fighting all our lives, no matter what. YOU'RE the one who said that when you perfected the Meidou Zangetsuha, when I was TRYINNA support you!" Now Inuyasha is shouting. The room behind Rin grows hushed, as palpable alarm descends on the company.

"Oh, great," Jaken and Kagome mutter in unison.

In the doorway, Sesshomaru stands fast. He hears his own heart quickening with icy fury in his ears. There is a humming in his head that makes it hard to think rationally. Only Inuyasha ever seems to have this effect on him. Restraint, restraint. He forces restraint upon himself, but it is slipping. "Hai. I did. But go inside." 

"KEH! I'm sure you're itchin' to start the fighting right back up. You're the one who won't give me my mom's fan back."

"Inuyasha, Inuyasha. You showed more than a morsel of wisdom, at last, during the final battle with Naraku. I had hoped that it meant you had grown _without _my help. But apparently it was a fluke, a hiccup of fortitude in your mental processes, a bit of adrenaline. Gone. You are no different now than when you were a child who _disgusted _me."

"WHAT?"

"All because you smile without thinking about it. Because you were born able to do so. That is why you never had to learn anything new. That is why you are LACKING…"

" 'SMILE?' S…SESSHOMARU, WHAT THE HELL?"

"…Well, Inuyasha, I may have to force myself to know how to deal with other living things. I MAY HAVE HAD TO LEARN HOW TO SMILE. I MAY HAVE HAD TO LEARN HOW TO FEEL THE PAIN OF OTHERS. _BUT I LEARNED_. I WENT THROUGH HARDSHIP AND I LEARNED, AND I SURVIVED. I AM THE SUPERIOR SON, _I_! _AND FATHER DID NOT KNOW IT, BUT I DO! _YOU WILL CEASE THIS DISRESPECT AND GO INSIDE _NOW!"_

"Oh, triple craps," Jaken adds, hearing Sesshomaru's voice spike to a roar. "Here we go…" 

Kagome leaves his side, relinquishing the rice mat to him, and heads for the door, where Rin stands. But when she touches Rin's arm, the child recoils with uncharacteristic ill temper, and juts out her lower lip.

Inuyasha is as stubborn as his brother. "LIKE HELL I WILL. LIKE HELL! FIGHT ME NOW, 'BIG BROTHER!' GIVE ME MY MOTHER'S FAN!" 

"YOU COULD NEVER PROTECT ANYONE, YOU LITTLE BASTARD. NOT YOUR DEAD MIKO, NOT THAT HIGURASHI GIRL, NOT EVEN YOURSELF! BUT I CAN. I CAN!"

Rin starts to cry. It is she whom Sesshomaru-sama protects. It is she to whom he refers. He tries very hard to smile for her, and look at her. Is it because being with her reminds him of what his papa didn't like about him, that he is sad and angry at Inuyasha-sama now? 

She feels responsible, suddenly, for the vicious argument between the brothers. "S-stop," she mumbles, gulping, wiping her eyes with a tiny fist. "Stop!" She steps towards them. 

Sesshomaru, who knows the pace of her heart and of her every breath, who knows her favorite color and food and all her dreams and nightmares, who knows her smell and her location at all hours, all minutes, all seconds, right now is oblivious to Rin's advance. He is too angry with Inuyasha.

And Inuyasha is too angry with him. His eyes are wet and frenzied, and he flies blindly at his brother. "YOU ASSHOLE…YOU HEARTLESS SHITTING ASSHOLE! I'LL KILL YOU!" 

"HOH!" Sesshomaru barks a single harsh laugh, and his voice creeps down to an arctic whisper once more. "Heartless, am I? Very well, Inuyasha, you may think that if you will, like all the rest. Now, you will _die_." He lunges with lethal grace. 

Rin rushes forward—right between them. "STOP! PLEASE STOP!" she cries. 

Reflex reigns over thought. The dog demons' blades cast out trembling, powerful attacks at the same time. The energies of their two swords collide and ricochet off the hut wall. All of the attack then plummets forcefully into the snow, making a crater in the earth about ten safe feet from the hut.

That is, _almost_ all of it.

A single, small blade of blue-white offensive magic, from their two fused spells, splinters from the main spell. It strikes Rin right in the stomach.

She flops over in the snow, terrifyingly still. A pool of thick dark red forms on the front of her little checkered yukata. 

Sesshomaru wakes up. "…Rin?" 

Inuyasha drops his sword. "Oh…oh shit…_shit_…"

Sesshomaru is filled with a rage he cannot himself comprehend—a rage and a despair. It chokes him, and the sound of sicking up fills his throat, but nothing, not even bile, comes. He casts Bakusaiga aside and dives for Rin's body. 

He is brought to his knees. 

Kagome and Sango come to the doorway. Sango screams. 

Sesshomaru cannot see. All is red and vibrating. But through that bloody mist there is a little body that belongs to him, a little soul that he loves more than his own life. That peculiar strangled, gagging sound keeps flooding his throat, mingled with it the muffled sound of a dog in torturous pain whimpering and yelping. 

Inuyasha is standing over them both, hands spread out, empty and useless. "Sesshomaru?" he stammers, stunned, and then, again, "Oh, shit." 

"NO NO. NO NO NO. NO." Sesshomaru's voice is strange as he lifts Rin into his arms, as he holds her and does not know what to do. As he feels ten times as powerless as Rin felt only moments before. It is loud, his voice, but it is oddly toneless—like the voice of a robot with difficulty modulating its volume. "NO NO. NO." He keeps saying it over and over, face shaking but determinedly blank. 

Jaken stumbles out past Kagome and Sango. His webbed hands cover his beaklike mouth. He is almost convulsively shivering. Perhaps the sight of Sesshomaru having taken such total leave of his self-control frightens the toad youkai. "Sesshomaru-s-sam..sama…Rin is…R-Rin needs…" 

"Do not touch her nobody touch her no." In that same toneless voice, without pause for breath, Sesshomaru hoards the bleeding Rin to his chest. Soon red stains the whole front of his regal kimono. "None of you none of you do not touch her no she is not dead. Do not do not…" His hands claw at her little head and cradle it. 

"Milord, someone needs to attend to her wounds," Jaken chokes out, trying to reason with Sesshomaru, and his oddly robotic hysteria. The toad looks around, pleading for assistance. 

"Sesshomaru, you HAVE to listen to Jaken," Kagome breaks in, while Sango, who has seen too much suffering on the part of a child already in her brother, stands there sobbing in a broken way. 

"Get away I will take her inside myself get away," Sesshomaru mumbles, standing clumsily, so unlike himself, almost teetering. "I will save her me I will save her get away." He flies right past Inuyasha, who looks sick and ashamed. The younger Inu brother gapes at the blood in the snow where Rin had been. Then he walks behind the hut and vomits. 

Kagome goes to Inuyasha and braces him against his retching, and Sango retreats inside, where a deeply alarmed Miroku receives her in his arms. 

Sesshomaru rushes towards the hut door. 

And Kaede steps outside. "Sesshomaru. Give thy child to me. NOW."

Sesshomaru stares at her as though her words don't register. His vice grip on Rin's little body lessens the slightest bit.

The old miko seizes that chance and snatches Rin from him. She carries the child inside. 

Sesshomaru stands there empty handed with all eyes on him. He looks as though he is sleepwalking. Blood covers the front of his chest and stomach, and part of his mokomoko. He looks down at it, and then straight ahead again. 

Inuyasha returns around the front of the hut, wiping off his mouth. Next to him, Kagome hands him snow to eat. 

Sesshomaru turns and stares at Inuyasha, and for the briefest instant, his expression conveys blank helplessness. For some reason, this makes Jaken start to bawl. 

Inuyasha jumps, and stares back at his older brother just as helplessly. "Stop lookin' at me like that…"

"Like what?" Sesshomaru is barely audible. 

"Like ya dunno what to do and want _me_ to figure it out. Like…you lost your soul."

Sesshomaru smiles. It is the weirdest little desolate grin conceivable. "Perhaps I have just killed it." 

Inuyasha falls mute again. 

Kaede steps back outside, the sleeves of her kimono rolled up. She too has blood all over her body. 

"Jaken, Kagome, come inside, I need both Miroku and thee to help me sew up the wound. And YOU two," she snaps in Inuyasha and Sesshomaru's direction. "_Foolish squabbling pups_! Use thy speed to fetch some more clean rags. Take anything ye can find! GO!" 

Sesshomaru seems to wake up again. He has turned and run in the direction Kaede points before the command even processes through Inuyasha's brain. With a disgruntled noise, the younger brother swoops outside in pursuit. 

He comes upon his older half-sibling literally ripping apart the village. "Woah—EASY!" Inuyasha screams at him. He is disturbed at the sight of his dispassionate elder without a shred of composure. He is still more uncomfortable at the role reversal. 

Sesshomaru doesn't hear him. His eyes crimson, the pupils tiny emerald slits, the dog demon bares his fangs and silently rampages through the wares left outside every single hut. His process is bizarrely cool and logical—a straight line from one residence, in which the inhabitants doubtlessly cower away from the door, to the next. But what he does to each porch is anything but refined. Long laces of venom ribbons whip out from his claws, demolishing everything unuseful to saving Rin, as if it is everyone in the whole world's fault for not anticipating that precious, irreplaceable child's malady. Still, in the middle of his mute tirade, he plucks up any clean laundry, any towels or rags, that have been left on any back porch.

Inuyasha watches transfixed for a few seconds, for once, himself, at a loss for words. Then he relinquishes his effort to calm his older brother. Careful to keep out of Sesshomaru's relentlessly destructive path, he follows and calmly picks up every possible useful length of cloth that Sesshomaru has missed. 

When the resource is fully spent, Inuyasha steps back to the door of Kaede's hut and resumes his silent vigil of the distraught inu daiyoukai. He realizes that as much as a part of him hates Sesshomaru, another part of him deeply admires him, and wants nothing more than to impress him. And always has. 

He feels strangely flung back in time. Perhaps it is because this is only the second time in over a hundred years that Inuyasha has ever seen some kind of tenderness, some kind of true deep feeling, exhibited by his brother. The first was long, long ago. 

The first time that Inuyasha really spoke to his big brother, he was Rin's age and Sesshomaru was approximately 17—just on the threshold of the age where a youkai's maturation slows to a creeping several hundred human years for every demon year. For that reason, Sesshomaru looks little different now, around 19 or 20 in demon years, than he did when Inuyasha was a child. 

He had seen the 17-year-old Sesshomaru at a distance, at noblemen's teas and ritualistic gatherings, many times. He had been awed instantly at his older sibling's cool, utterly self-confident, fierce grace. And he had been fascinated, compelled, towards his brother—because his mother, Lady Izayoi, had told him so many times that his father, whom he had never known, had looked exactly like Sesshomaru. The only difference was not of appearance, but of countenance—Sesshomaru was more guarded, less demonstrative, than Inu no Taisho had been. And Sesshomaru was to be treated with respect and to be allowed his distance—he was a lord, a prince, the son of a legend. "Respect his anger towards you, Inuyasha," mother had said. "He is a child still himself, no matter his regal bearing, and what your father and I did, though destined, though right, did hurt him, and his own mother. Try to understand. Perhaps then the two of you can arrive at some sort of…peace."

Right. Mother, if only it had been so easy. If only any family matter ever was. 

But before resentment hardened into hatred between the brothers, Inuyasha remembers one instance in which he and Sesshomaru sat together in the same place, enjoyed each other's company, and did not once engage in battle. 

After Inu no Taisho's death, Sesshomaru's mother had read his will—apparently drawn up long before he battled the daiyoukai Ryukotsei, and ran into that burning building to save Izayoi and the infant Inuyasha, and was finished. In it, the great dog demon had nearly begged his first wife to take Sesshomaru exactly seven times to Izayoi's abode, to be with the child Inuyasha. They need do little more than have dinner, exchange a few words, and leave. But he wanted his sons to know each other. 

So one night Sesshomaru and his mother met Izayoi and Inuyasha at a datsuijou, the best bathhouse, in fact, in the western lands. They ate a hefty meal in gravelike silence. The little Inuyasha scowled and tried to eat more than his brother, who was forced to sit next to him. Sesshomaru quietly taunted him and told him that only a real man could eat two bowls of rice. Inuyasha rose to the challenge and resultantly got sick—all over Sesshomaru's kimono. Sesshomaru's delicate little nose curled in disgust at the mess. 

For some reason Sesshomaru's mother found his misfortune mildly amusing. She chuckled and suggested that if he had been such a fool as to provoke his little brother to this illness, perhaps he was the one who should take charge of Inuyasha's better health for the evening. Izayoi cast a penetrating stare at the other mother, but said nothing. 

Sesshomaru gave his mother a look of repressed fury, but nodded, hoisted Inuyasha up indelicately under one arm, and marched out to the most luxurious and large of all the bath house's hot springs. He flung off his kimono, fairly ripped off Inuyasha's, and stepped, naked all but for a towel wrapped around his waist, into the steaming water. He leaned back and closed his eyes. 

Inuyasha's stomach began to settle in the silence and the strange tranquility that befell them both. He swam cautiously over to Sesshomaru's imperiously reclined form, staring at the imposingly perfect chest, biceps, and head that stuck out of the hot water. One of Sesshomaru's red-lidded eyes snapped open. "What?" he hissed.

"Onii-sama, how do I become like you?" the painfully awkward squeak of a prepubescent boy answered.

"You do not. You are a hanyou." 

"But if I train hard…"

More silence. The brothers' eyes locked. Sesshomaru's impatient pout became a strange little smile—just like the one he offered Inuyasha tonight, before the two of them injured Rin. "Very well. Attack me." 

Inuyasha slorshed out of the water, buck naked, flying clumsily at his teenage brother. 

He slipped on a wet sharp rock, hit his forehead on it, and fell dazed back into the water.

Only a few seconds passed before he felt himself hoisted upright. His breath caught in his throat because big brother was holding him up with his right hand, and wiping blood off his forehead with his left. Then Sesshomaru stared, transfixed for a moment, down at the trickling red from his brother that stained his own hands. The look on his face was inscrutable. Was blood thinner than water in this case? Perhaps for a moment Cain yearned to slay Abel. Or perhaps Sesshomaru was actually concerned for Inuyasha. 

Then the moment passed, as his topaz eyes snapped up into Inuyasha's confused little face. "That was pathetic. But it provided you with a pedagogical opportunity."

"A what?"

"You're going to be taught something. By me."

Inuyasha gawked with open awe at Sesshomaru. "Is the cut on my head shaped like a moon crescent, onii-sama?"

"What? Why would you ask such a stupid question? Don't interrupt me, I am going to teach you a battle move. And then I am going to take you inside so that someone can sew up your forehead…"

"Oh, ano, honored big brother, I just asked 'cause then if it scars I'll have a fearsome mark on my forehead just like yours …"

"Shh! Pay attention or I will not teach you because you will have lost too much blood for it to be safe."

"Gomen…But I would love to die a great warrior's death of blood loss, onii-sama…!"

"Inuyasha, _shut up_, I said. There is _no need_ for a child to die of a bonk to the head. Stupid. Now. Stop _grinning _at me first of all. No warrior grins at his enemy."

"Are we enemies?"

Sesshomaru sighed. "If you don't already think…hmph. Just. Play pretend, Inuyasha." 

"Hai, onii-sama! What are we playing?"

"Stupid, that is what I am telling you right _now_. You are bleeding too much, hurry and listen. Learn to LISTEN, Inuyasha." The oddly preaching, well-intending educator's tone which would frequently characterize the manner in which Sesshomaru addressed his little brother as they aged—even when they truly learned to hate each other, and were in the middle of a fight to the death—began to surface in that very moment. 

"Hai! Gomen." Inuyasha's irascible temper and desire to contradict Sesshomaru's advice—merely for the sake of contradicting it—had _not_, contrariwise, yet surfaced. 

"Good. Dip your claws in the blood on your forehead. Like that, yes. Now come at me again. Only this time firmly recite the incantation 'Blades of Blood.' I will observe."

"Hai, Sessho-nii-chan!" Inuyasha squealed, forgetting a second time not to grin adoringly at this amazing and awesome male role model upon whom he'd literally stumbled. And puked.

"Do not call me that," Sesshomaru mumbled, looking only mildly irritated, and folding his arms across his perfect chest. 

It really was a long time ago.

"BLADES OF BLOOD!" the child shrieked, sounding something like a dying peacock. He splashed towards his big brother with impossible clumsiness.

Sesshomaru's lips twitched up. He rolled his eyes and did not dodge.

Tiny sharp crescents of red flew out of Inuyasha's claws, horribly aimed. Only one of them even struck Sesshomaru, but it sliced open a wound in his forehead, right over the moon crescent. To this day there is a scar there, but the marking of the Prussian blue crescent conceals it. 

Sesshomaru didn't even wince as a rivulet of red descended his forehead and the side of his cheek. "Impressive," he said, and meant it. Fairly swiftly, his powerful youkai skin congealed around the wound and sealed it off. 

"UWAH! Big brother, big brother! Are you HURT?" the child shrilled. He reached up for Sesshomaru.

"…No." 

"I didn't meanna HURT you!" The child's lip trembled but he fought the tears bravely.

"…Stand up. We are going inside. You are pale. What are y…_do not cry_." Sesshomaru scooted back and away from his little brother as if the tears were a contagious disease. "Do not cry, I do not know what to do when someone cries. I do not know what to do."

Inuyasha gulped and looked up into onii-sama's face. It was still blank, but he was sure he heard panic in it. "I won't cry but I dunno why you're so upset…"

"I do not like not knowing what to do," Sesshomaru breathed, rising more hastily than usual from the water. "I do not know about those things. I am lacking with those things. I do not like lacking in something, either."

"What things?"

"Feelings. Emotions."

"…I think y'do, Sessho-nii-chan. I think you know all about 'em. You just…forget…"

"I SAID do not call me that. Stand, Inuyasha."

The child tried very hard to obey. He stumbled and his knees buckled. Sesshomaru reached under his arms and scooped him to his feet, then stepped back. And again. And again. Each time Inuyasha fell on his way into the bath house, Sesshomaru picked him up. But he did not hover, nor did he carry him. He stepped back and made Inuyasha stand on his own strength. And that may have been the most valuable lesson the child learned that day. 

Inuyasha has never forgotten it, actually. 

He allows himself to feel sympathy—just a twinge of it—as Sesshomaru quiets down, cradling filched blankets to his chest, and leaning against a forlorn, snow-dusted post near Kaede's hut. 

"Sesshomaru," the little brother calls out to the big brother. "I think…you do." 

"What the hell are you stuttering about?" Sesshomaru whirls around, scowling at him. The act is premature—he has not yet reinstated his blank mask, and his expression looks ravaged, tired, and lost. 

Inuyasha blinks. Shit. The quotation of the past was accidental, a slip. "I…mean I think ya have plenty of blankets for Rin now. Let's go in…"

"Piss off, pup. I do not recall you having enough brains to order me around." But Sesshomaru immediately begins to march towards the hut door, taking the advice.

His transparent desire to put Inuyasha down simply for the sake of ritual, at a time like this, deeply irritates the younger dog demon. "DAMN it, Sesshomaru! Stop acting like such a big SHIT. I let ya KEEP the god damned fan that belonged to my mother, for whatever sick reason ya got, but this ain't about US anymore! It ain't about my mom! It's about your kid! REMEMBER? The human-blooded creature ya DON'T hate!"

Mistake. Sesshomaru isn't quite so calm yet, after all. He seizes Inuyasha by the front of his bright water rat kimono. He shakes him once, twice. And then he starts preaching. 

"I am surprised I do not hear rattling in your skull. LISTEN. You NEVER learned to LISTEN! Do you want to know a secret, little brother? I do not hate you because you are a hanyou. I see humans as weak, yes, but not immediately deserving of contempt. No. I hate you because you took what I struggled for years to earn, simply by _existing_—by being a fetus that suddenly appeared in a home-wrecking whore's womb. And you never gave it back. And then he died." 

Inuyasha's face is blotchy, struggling between the paleness of abashment and the redness of rage. His eyes are bright, but tears in front of Sesshomaru are as unthinkable, as forbidden, as they were when he was a child. "Why do you blame me for what our parents did? How is it my fault?" 

"I must have someone to hate for all this. I have to have someone living to blame. That is why."

"THAT'S A PATHETIC ANSWER!" Inuyasha jerks out of his grasp. Inuyasha feels safer bellowing. Anger is safer than sorrow or disappointment or vulnerability, or an admission of hero-worship long since repressed. Much safer.

"You show me no deference. You never have. You never bow to your elder. In every way you prove the mistake and interference that you are. Your weakness has nothing to do with your half-humanity—I realize that now. It is bred into your character. You are thankless and crass and you never take responsibility for anything." Sesshomaru feels safer droning. Automatism is so much safer than sorrow or disappointment or vulnerability, or an admission of protective instincts long since repressed. Much safer. 

"I TRIED TO SHOW YOU DEFERENCE! WHEN I WAS A LITTLE KID. DO YOU REMEMBER THAT, SESSHOMARU?" Inuyasha tosses the rags inside the hut doorway. "But HOW MANY TIMES should a guy bow down to a brother who spits on his mother's grave? A brother who's his last link to their dad, who yanks away his arm and sneers at me to buzz off when I go runnin' up to him beggin' for ANSWERS? Who says I ain't WORTHY of knowin' what dad LOOKED like? I DUNNO HOW THAT KID IN THERE GOT YOU TO LOVE HER, BECAUSE YA SURE NEVER FELT LIKE CONDESCENDING TO LOVE ANYONE ELSE! I'M lucky SOMEONE took pity on me after mom died and I ran away from her dojo, and left me a big pile of fish every stinkin' DAY. At least SOMEBODY gave a shit…" 

"Idiot. That somebody was ME." Suddenly Sesshomaru is in Inuyasha's face, nose-to-nose, his hot breath coming in self-controlling, panting gasps. His ore irises rivet his little brother in place. "I protected you then, and ALWAYS have, you little FOOL. I ALWAYS confronted your enemies, ALWAYS told them that _only I_ was worthy of killing you, ONLY I! If you hate me so much too, Inuyasha, never fear—if that child in there dies, I will be but a walking corpse which you will be free to cast aside with your _Gentle Breeze_ Scar! Now, we are _wasting time_ out here. This conversation is over. OVER!" And with that, Inuyasha's older brother storms inside Kaede's hut.

Inuyasha stands frozen for several moments, the epiphany inadvertently given to him by Sesshomaru still ringing in his ears. He bites his lip, and assumes every bit of resolve he has. Then he too steps inside.

A heated debate has ensued among the various members of the traveling party.

Sesshomaru is bent stiffly over Rin's terribly still and pale little body. While Kaede wraps the cloth he has brought inside around Rin's gashing torso wound, he says nothing. But the vicious expression on his face is an easy enough indicator that he is listening to every syllable spoken. 

Jaken stands about four feet away from his master, clutching his staff, ambivalent, his face openly terrified, perhaps as a satellite registering what Sesshomaru cannot himself show.

"What do you mean, a blood transfusion?" Sango demands of Kagome. "I have never heard of such magic…might it be too harsh on the child? I don't know if I'd let anyone try it on Kohaku…"

"It's not magic," Kagome protests. "It's medicinal—it's science. When someone loses too much blood, sometimes we open up a vein and put in a needle called an IV, and give them someone else's blood to strengthen them. I think I know how, and Kaede can help, I'm sure…" 

"Whose blood?" Sesshomaru jolts at the sound of his own voice. It is cold, brusque, and demanding as usual around this band of comrades, but the words have come out of their own accord, against his attempts to appear coolly disinterested in the entire affair. 

Kagome swallows, and musters her courage. When she does this, she reminds Sesshomaru painfully of Rin. He is not sure if the twinge this inspires in his chest is visible as some sort of agony on his face, but the disconcerted expression that crosses the face of the miko confirms that it must have been. She finally speaks. "Well, um…I'm not really an expert, but…"  
"_Spit it out_, Higurashi-san," he hisses. He feels a pulsing, throbbing pressure behind his eyes. It's a sensation he always gets when they flicker from their golden human hue to the threatening mixture of red and green that is part of his true form's appearance. 

Inuyasha bristles protectively at this, crossing the threshold and moving in front of Kagome. 

Kagome puts a hand on Inuyasha's chest, without even looking at him. "Don't," she murmurs. Then, more loudly, "The blood of a demon, I would guess. A hanyou…or better yet, a youkai. Isn't it stronger? Immortal, or something?" 

Kaede grunts and nods, Jaken makes an exclamatory sound, and Miroku injects, "That actually makes a great deal of sense." 

In frustration, Jaken punches the floor with the bottom of his staff. " Oh, COME! What youkai would taint his own blood, would sacrifice a drop of it, for the sake of a mere—" 

Sesshomaru thrusts out his newly regenerated left arm at the group huddled over Rin. They scatter in alarm. 

The inu daiyoukai feels his breathing become unsteady with a passion he seems uncharacteristically unable to control. He locks eyes with Kagome, and, with his right hand, yanks up his left sleeve. His words come through bared fangs and tight lips, fierce but choked. "Puncture it. Dice it. Cut it off again. Do what you will. Take every drop you need. Whatever you need, for her. Do it NOW." His face feels incredibly hot with the sudden tidal wave of emotion that fills his pores. Indecent, undignified emotion. He doesn't care. He just doesn't. 

A stunned silence falls over the hut. Rin's ragged breathing becomes exponentially louder in that silence. 

Oh ancestors. No. Rin, no. Of all the trials in the world, the only one he cannot face…

"_What are you waiting for_?" Sesshomaru barks. He shoves his bared forearm a second time in Kagome's direction. "DO IT." 

He doesn't understand why her eyes are full of tears but she is, at the same time, smiling. He doesn't care, though. He just wants her to fix Rin. 

For some reason, Kagome turns to her partners, a hand over her mouth. Inuyasha is gazing at his older brother with an expression of consternation and open awe. Miroku nods at Kagome, and Sango grasps her shoulder. "I'll help," the youkai huntress mutters. 

Kagome looks at Jaken as if for counsel. 

The toad youkai is blubbering fiercely into his wrinkled little green hands. "Rin, Rin, poor Rin, Sesshomaru-sama is going to save you," he whimpers pathetically.

It apparently confirms some hope of sincerity in the miko's mind, because then she turns directly to Sesshomaru. "Alright. It will hurt."

"_Do you think I CARE about THAT_?" Sesshomaru all but roars. 

"Verily ye be a father now," Kaede breathes. 

"Of COURSE I am!" He whirls on the old woman and flings this retort without a single thought. 

And that is when Inuyasha, unable to contain himself, speaks. "If his blood isn't enough, I'll help too." 

The brothers's eyes lock. "_You_?" Sesshomaru sputters. His mokomoko seems to puff up in indignation. 

"Hai," Inuyasha replies, a bit confrontationally. "_Me_. It took _both_ of us to hurt her. If it takes both of us to heal her, I'm _fine_ with that. We killed Naraku. But this is the biggest thing we've faced since he died, and I'm with ya all the way in it. Anyway, you…it just needs to work." He averts his eyes, the same hue as Sesshomaru's, but larger, younger, more open and wondering, uncomfortably. "It just does."

Sesshomaru snaps shut his mouth, with the clicking sound of fangs coming together like a steel trap. When he speaks his words are dangerously soft, like pellets of ice hitting glass. "This Sesshomaru is sufficient. I am _all_ she needs. I _will not share her with you._ No. I have relinquished _everything_ else to you for our father's sake. You have taken everything from me, otouto-san. She was the thing I got, that I did not expect to ever receive. The treasure that did not come from father, that I did not need to covet from you. She saved me. _So I will be the one who saves her back. Not you_." 

Inuyasha's eyes, for once gentle and earnest towards his older brother, slowly glaze back over with a more familiar resentment and guardedness. "Are you SERIOUS?" 

Sesshomaru thinks he may explode at the conflict he suddenly feels. His lips form the "hai," but the word doesn't come. 

"Are ye really going to be so stubborn and self-absorbed now?" Kaede ambles into the center of the group, and, with incredible courage, or perhaps the quixotic foolishness of the elderly, shoves Sesshomaru in the chest. "When Rin needs ye to save her at any cost? _Idiot_! Do _not_ throw away your treasure for your pride!"

"HEED ME, old woman!" Jaken blurts behind her, his puce forehead beaded with sweat. "Do not provoke him now, for your life's sake!" 

But Sesshomaru doesn't move. He only stares down at Kaede, transfixed. His gaze shifts to Rin, ever paler, ever stiller. "…Fine, Inuyasha," he whispers. "You too. But me first." 


	7. Joy

**Accountable**

**An InuYasha fanfiction**

**By Amber C.S.**

**Chapter 7: Joy**

"When you're weary  
Feeling small  
When tears are in your eyes  
I will dry them all

I'm on your side  
When times get rough  
And friends just can't be found  
Like a bridge over troubled water  
I will lay me down  
Like a bridge over troubled water  
I will lay me down

When you're down and out  
When you're on the street  
When evening falls so hard  
I will comfort you

I'll take your part  
When darkness comes  
And pain is all around  
Like a bridge over troubled water  
I will lay me down  
Like a bridge over troubled water  
I will lay me down

Sail on Silver Girl,  
Sail on by  
Your time has come to shine  
All your dreams are on their way

See how they shine  
If you need a friend  
I'm sailing right behind  
Like a bridge over troubled water  
I will ease your mind  
Like a bridge over troubled water  
I will ease your mind"  
--Simon and Garfunkel

Kaede pulls two arrows out of Kagome's quiver. With heated up metalsmith tools ordinarily used to repair her hiraikotsu, Sango cuts tiny holes down the arrows into the shafts. She hands the arrows back to the old miko.

Kaede's arthritic hands do not easily bind the two shafts together, the sharp ends both facing out, as Kagome instructs.

Sango moves to help her as promised, her eyelids red and swollen from her earlier tears.

Sesshomaru says nothing but a feral growl creeps dangerously along the bottom registers of his throat. His eyes heat, the whites leaking red.

Miroku steps forward, and next to, Sango. "What is your complaint?" he murmurs in a soothing voice, like deep running water.  
"Not _her_," is all Sesshomaru replies. "Not her. Attempted _infanticide_ is on her list of crimes." In a state in which he was less tensed to the brink of sanity, Sesshomaru would have spared Sango, who was once deluded by Naraku into almost killing Rin to save Miroku, such a scathing remark. After all, on the cusp of that horrible near-deed, she had slipped her gas mask on Rin's little face and nearly died of the shouki that consumed all the humans in the vicinity of the battle—more than atoning for her deed.

But right now, Sesshomaru is a scared and hurting father, under those hundreds of layers of frost and composure. So he feels like being cruel to the most convenient human outlet.

Sango seems to reel in place. Her eyes water, she clears her throat and nods, and steps out of range.

Miroku looks conflicted—irritated and insulted on Sango's behalf, but also coolly aware of the child's need for help, and Sesshomaru's tendency, much like his younger brother's, to be bullheaded about things being his way. "Very well," he says. "Do you have any problem with _me_ helping Kaede?"

"No," Sesshomaru grunts. He has not moved from the stance he took several moments ago—left, newly regrown, arm oustretched, wrist up, offering anything and everything to the salvation of Rin.

"Then do it," Kagome mutters sidelong to the monk. She procures an alcohol swab from the first aid kit in her tote, and wipes it hastily across the inner skin of Sesshomaru's forearm. The inu daiyoukai does not flinch, but his nostrils flare at the burning scent of the antiseptic. Standing directly next to his brother as though to silently support his elder, an uncharacteristically reverent and obedient Inuyasha bites his lip and rolls up his left sleeve as well.

"Pump your fists," Kagome tells both dog demons, pantomiming the gesture. "It'll get the blood flowing."

Sesshomaru robotically mimics her. Inuyasha attentively mimics Sesshomaru, with a touch of flair to his interpretation. Neither dog demon looks at the other's face. Not yet. Inuyasha is looking at Sesshomaru's exposed wrist. And Sesshomaru is looking at Rin.

"Hurry up, houshi-sama," Kagome mutters half-sarcastically to Miroku. "Use those hands that love to stroke bottoms more usefully."

Miroku nods, his dark head bobbing once on his slender young neck. A pensive scowl settles on his comely, and ordinarily crafty, features. He begins to wrap waxed cords around the shafts of the primitive blood transfusion IV, while Kaede holds the arrows steady. Without a word, Jaken and Shippo both move in to help Kaede, bracing her hands. Shippo seems to be muttering comforting words to the toad youkai, who snivels and snorts to himself ceaselessly.

Miroku's work is quick, his fingers long and slender and deft, his right hand no longer cursed. "It's ready," he murmurs in Kagome's ear, offering the fastened-together shafts to the girl.

"Okay, Sesshomaru," Kagome breathes. "Get ready for…for the pinch."

He does not answer her. He does not seem to realize anyone is there. Anyone except his daughter.

The sharp arrow tip slices coarsely into his flesh, into his protruding blue vein. There is no indication that he feels pain—except for the sharp little sucking-in of air through his squeezed lips. Ordinary physical wounds are negligible to Sesshomaru's powerful body. For that reason, it is by his very will to save his child that the arrow is able to pierce his skin in the first place.

Sesshomaru watches Rin's steady descent to total stillness, total pallor, as she lies there on the rice mat with Kaede dabbing a cloth at her brow. The gash to her middle is sewn up, but the damage is already done—so much blood lost. His jaw grinds.

Kagome takes his spastic facial expression as physical pain. She draws back, pulling the arrow shaft out.

"What are you doing?" The daiyoukai hisses, turning at once to nail her to the spot with his furious gaze. "_Put it back in_."

"Easy," Inuyasha grumbles.

"No. I will _not_ be 'easy.' Kisama, put it back in!"

Kagome swallows and musters both courage and patience. "I thought that…"

"Forget what you thought," snaps Sesshomaru. "Do not _think_. Fix her. Just _fix _her."

She obeys instantly, and with a gruesome squishing and pop-popping sound, the arrow slides fully back under the surface of Seshsomaru's skin. "It…seems to be working," she muses. "You were bleeding a lot when I pulled it out…a-ha, there, it's coming out the other arrow tip. Perfect!...now…we need to cut into Rin's wrist too."

Sesshomaru's eyes squint closed at this thought, far more painful than his own wound—the soft, peach-like flesh of Rin being further punctured. "If it is necessary."

"It is."

"Then do it." He smells the overwhelming, precious, metallic smell of his own blood. Only once before has he smelled it this potently, on the night at his father's tomb, when he lost his arm to Inuyasha's Tessaiga. His stomach churns and threatens to empty itself all over Kagome and Inuyasha. He makes a sickened gulping sound before he gets a grasp on himself.

"You alright?" Inuyasha, astonishingly, murmurs.

"Is it in Rin yet?" the older brother counters with a question of his own. His eyes are still closed. He struggles for an expression of serenity, or at least of control.

"…yeah. It's in her. You're savin' her right now."

Sesshomaru's eyes slide open. They drink in the crude connector between his wrist and his child's. Rin is so far gone that she does not even stir in pain. His own wrist throbs, and then begins to feel cold, and tingle.

A weird thought occurs to the inu daiyoukai at that moment. "…she is really mine now. My blood…runs in her."

"I think she's been yours for a while," Inuyasha replies, looking, too, at Rin. "The blood's just…makin' it official."

"Is it so obvious?" An incredible softness descends on the ruthless warrior's face now, as he looks at the child's slumbering form, at her round little cheeks, which begin, just slightly, to bloom with spots of life-proving pink. It's a tenderness. Not a loud or proclamational love. But it's an irrefutable love, nonetheless, to someone who is really studying his face—as Inuyasha is, right now.

"Oh yeah. It is."

"Hmph. This Sesshomaru can admit a failure. I have failed to mask my affection for a mere human child. Perhaps Rin's power over me is that formidable that…hoh.." The room tilts. His ears tingle and his face goes cold. The great Sesshomaru nearly swoons. He realizes he has not conceded this much blood since recovering from the loss of his left arm, two years past. Then, too, he was nearly delirious. "Hoh. Strange feeling. Like…Bees in my skin…Naraku…"

Jaken yelps.

Inuyasha jerks out an arm to steady Sesshomaru, who is so dazed, at the moment, that he does not think to buck that hand off his shoulderblades. The younger dog demon bites his lip again. He thinks of being a little boy. Of having someone picking him up on his way into a bathhouse after he had lost blood, over and over. He thinks on returning favors, and recognizing what family remains in this life. And on celebrating a remarkable change of heart in that single family member. "Kagome," he says, "my turn."

The modern miko has already been dislodging the arrowhead from Seshsomaru's wrist—his depletion of blood is noticeable to her, as well. "Well…Inuyasha, Rin is already loads better, look at her complexion…and her breathing's not so shallow, so you don't really need to…"

"I said my turn. I just wanna do it. Okay?"

Maybe it's to prove he can match big brother for physical stamina—to boast that _he_ didn't swoon like some pansy.

Maybe it's something a lot more tender than that.

Either way, Inuyasha shoves his wrist at Kagome, just like Sesshomaru did. "Just a little," he adds.

"Let him," croaks Kaede, suddenly kneeling there between them, and wiping the excess blood from Rin's wrist. She transfers the cloth to Sesshomaru's wrist, nursing him as well.

The older brother is watching the younger brother keenly now, his senses having returned. His expression is as unreadable as ever. "Hai," he finally says, rejoining Kaede.

Inuyasha jumps and turns to his brother. He scowls in shock as Kagome wipes alcohol over the arrowtip and punctures his wrist. He gives a startled yowl, but falls into stoic silence after that.

Sesshomaru just stares back.

A long, uncomfortable pause.

Inuyasha clears his throat. "…So. Every day. A pile of fish. You."

Sesshomaru's eyebrow raises. "Hai. It was me. Every day until you were old enough to hunt your own food."

"…alright then." Inuyasha clears his throat again. His cheeks are ruddy as he averts his eyes to the floorboards. "Why are you doin' this? For…for this little human girl? What's up with you keepin' her? Are you waitin' till she comes of age, to…" he flushes. "Er…you know…"

"Do not be revolting. She is my daughter. And always will be."

"But why?"

"I really do not know why. Why she is so precious, other than the fact that she finishes a part of me that could not be finished before I saved her with Tenseiga."

"Oh. Oh yeah. So that's why you didn't even try to use it tonight. Word from Sango's brother is you even saved her from hell once."

"Hai. I did."

"So…"

"I said I do not _know_ why, Inuyasha. Or… I do, yet cannot seem to give it words. But I…"

"…yeah." Sesshomaru doesn't need to finish his sentence. Inuyasha knows how hard it is to say the word "love." He glances at Kagome. It's a very different kind of love he feels towards her, and keeps precious, held inside and against his chest. But it's just as hard to say it. He knows. He lets out an introverted, contemplative sigh.

Sesshomaru gazes vaguely at him, fascinated by his embarrassment and deference. "It is a shame you did not behave this way the past hundred or so years. I might have been able to stand the sight of you. And the smell of you. Well. Perhaps not the latter. You reek of wet dog."

"I could say the same thing," the hanyou snarls back, immediately rising to the bait. "You're different lately. It's good. Stay that way."

Sesshomaru lets out some kind of snort. "Your gesture just now was melodramatic.."

"OH YEAH, WELL…"

"…And valorous. And very…very…honorable."

Inuyasha blinks. He winces as Kagome pulls the arrow out of his wrist, and out of Rin's, for good. Kaede shoves a cloth over Rin's wrist to stop her bleeding.

Sesshomaru nods, soberly, once. The look he offers Inuyasha is one of…

Respect.

And…approval. Real approval.

"Inuyasha, in return for this deed, I swear never to raise a hand against your miko Kagome again. Under any circumstance."

The little brother cocks his head at the big brother. Then he nods, and that is all.

"You two should lie down," Kagome gently suggests.

Sesshomaru bristles just a little. "I shall not sleep until I am certain Rin is alright."

"She is more than out of danger, great dog demon," Kaede happily barks, gesturing wildly from where she is crouched over the child. "Far more! Look—behold!"

The trio of human, hanyou, and youkai all freeze.

Sesshomaru, as usual, is the first to recover.

"What?" he murmurs. Every inch of him is tingling again, but it is not because of his blood loss. He lurches forward on all fours over Rin's body, glaring fiercely down into her face. He realizes he is holding his breath, but he can't seem to expel it.

He searches, searches, for Kaede's meaning. "_I do not understand_," he growls, incomprehensibly frustrated. "She is _not awake_." So still. So very still. He leans down closer into Rin's face, to make sure that the sound of her breathing is not a deception of his anxious mind. Faint sweet tea-cookie-scented breath rises from her mouth and tickles his nose. "…though…she is alive…" He lets out his own breath at last.

"Look at her _ears_, great dog demon," Kaede guides him in a hushed and tear-shaking voice. "Look at thy daughter's _ears_!"

Ears. Sesshomaru glances around. Human ears are rounded, soft. Demon ears are…different. His blood. Rin has his blood now…ears…

Oh. It could not be. Nothing so perfect and wonderful. After a lifetime of hardship, Sesshomaru cannot imagine a deepest hope being fulfilled this perfectly.

He is afraid to look. His eyes squeeze shut and for a second time he reminds himself how to exhale.

If he has misunderstood Kaede, it will destroy him. He has let his stoic shell crack, and he has let a desperate longing ache to the fore of his mind. If he has misunderstood her…

Must look. Must.

"Are you _mad_?" Jaken snaps at Kaede, jolting the inu daiyoukai's eyes open.

What Sesshomaru sees makes him gasp—just audibly.

"…Oh…" he breathes. He doesn't sound like himself at all. The great Sesshomaru-sama's voice would not ordinarily sound so small. But…

"ZIP IT, Jaken," Inuyasha snarls, from his place peering over Sesshomaru's shoulder. And then, "What is it? Lemme see…Ano…Sesshomaru? HEY. Let me SEE…"

Sesshomaru is worlds away. Universes. His eyes are wide and unguarded. His mouth hangs just slightly open. He reaches both hands magnetically towards Rin's tiny, sweet, messy head.

"_Oh my God,_" Kagome breathes. "Of _course_…" Her hands fly to her mouth. She has already seen it. The rest of the company gathers hastily behind her. Jaken starts bawling again.

Sesshomaru lifts up Rin's sleeping head, and with the gentleness of holding a paper-thin glass orb, he turns that head just to the left. Her right ear, like her left ear, is pointed.

Not human ears.

Hanyou ears.

"_Hoh_…" he whispers, a second time. _Stupid_. How _stupid _he feels, to have no more adequate way of expressing the magnitude of his joy. _Insufficient as always_, in that one regard—of showing emotion. But he had guessed Kaede's meaning right…and his ears hum with the feeling that is bottled up within his core, that cannot quite seem to expel itself.

"Then she is all but immortal now, too!" Jaken chokes out.

Dread fills Sesshomaru. He nearly gags on it. He is mute, unable to voice his sudden fear. He kneels there, stupidly, just holding Rin's head, and gazing at her, overwhelmed, shocked.

For the first time in their lives, however, he and his little brother are on precisely the same mental wavelength. Inuyasha speaks. "If it was just one time with our blood, though, will it run out? Or is she…like this forever?"

Kaede roughly wipes at her aging eyes. Through milky cataracts, they still burn with joy. "My sister saw this done before. Many times, and usually by accident, when some filthy bloodsucking youkai or another mingled the blood of his victims. One of the hanyous that Kikyo knew, rendered a hanyou by this very process, is to this day still a hanyou."

An even longer silence. A very pregnant silence.

"Are you…" Sesshomaru cannot finish his sentence. His throat is so tight. He tries again. "Are…you sure?"

Kaede's smile is incredibly gentle, incredibly understanding. She wipes a wisp of white hair from her wrinkled face. Wrinkles which Rin will not, now, know for many centuries. "Hai, Sesshomaru-sama. I am sure."

The Lord of the Western Lands softly relinquishes his hold on the sleeping Rin's head. Stiffly, he stands. Rigidly, he walks to the door. And he continues to walk—right outside.

_Propelling…gyrating forward…ever forward in the eternal whiteness of the snow. Arms behind him, abandoning all dignity, eyes wet and burning and fluttering closed against the pellets of ice and snow that the heavens fling down on him. He lets out a roar of triumph that is lost to the shrieking winter winds, but that he feels, nonetheless, exquisitely._

_This must be what it is like to let go. _

_To let go completely._

_To be simply happy._

_His chest aches, it is slicing into windburned slivers, it is exploding open, it is losing all the weight it has carried for over three hundred years, the weight of being perpetually alone. Lifted. _

_Ecstasy._

_She is alright. _

_She is alright._

_She is alright._

_Rin is alright! Rin is really alright!_

_She will not die before him._

_He will not lose his Rin. He will not! He has protected his treasure! He has succeeded unquestionably! _

_Joy._

_Joy in she for whom he is accountable._

_Joy!_

_Sesshomaru runs and runs through the winter landscape, with boundless energy, panting, for some time. A lifetime of pent up emotions takes a lot of time to spend in one burst. _

Back in the hut, everyone gawks. Kagome exchanges a bewildered look with Sango, before stooping over Rin and removing her yukata, replacing it with a clean oversized robe of Kaede's.

"What the HELL…? Is he in shock?" Inuyasha begins to go retrieve his brother.

"No." And Jaken of all people slips in front of the younger dog demon, spreading wide his arms. "I understand. Heed me."

Inuyasha's ears twitch. "So spit it out, froggie."

"Sesshomaru-sama has finally allowed himself to be overcome with emotion. He cannot, nevertheless, show it in front of any of us. So he has excused himself outside until he has regained composure." Jaken places the Staff of Two Heads on the floor beside him, and simply plops down on his hindside, with finality. "It is because of his fondness for the child. No one could compete with that." He echoes words he has spoken to himself before, at a campfire, watching Rin sleeping in Sesshomaru's arms to ward off her nightmares. "It is as large as a mountain and as persistent as a river, that…ano..that love."

Another moment of collective slack-jaws.

"Oh," Inuyasha finally thinks to say.

"Yes, oh," adds the loquacious Miroku.

"We owe Rin a lot for the things she's done," Kagome whispers. "Sometimes I feel like I can really understand her…" Her thoughtful dark eyes wander to Inuyasha's face.

Inuyasha's cheeks color a faint scarlet. He coughs, and smiles rather dopily at the floor.

Sesshomaru bursts back into the room. His mokomoko fluffs up like the feathers of an alarmed fowl. His eyes, uncharacteristically wide, slowly narrow back to their half-hooded, calculated blankness. He forces himself to breathe a bit more steadily.

There is no evidence of tears. No puffy redness around the eyelids.

Inuyasha smells something briny though. Salty. And it only surfaced in his nostrils when his brother returned.

Sesshomaru is wet from head to toe, including his face, from the snow through which he has been racing. There would never be a way to prove it.

But Inuyasha still wonders. "_Keh_!" he mutters, still grinning.

"What?" Sesshomaru almost sounds grumpy, glaring around at the whole room confrontationally. "_Hmmm_ph," he adds, in that grunting cave man fashion, after a moment.

"Nothing, Sessho-nii-chan," Inuyasha smirks.

Miroku, Sango, Shippo, Kaede, Kagome, even Jaken and Kilala, seem to avert their eyes with an effort not to burst into giggles.

"Do not call me that," Sesshomaru snaps, well aware of the collective mirth. Were his stoic mask not firmly back in place, he might be blushing just like his little brother moments past. As is, he glides over to Rin, and squats down next to the fire. In a very canine fashion, he shakes off, a safe distance from getting a drop on the child. Then he reclines fully next to her form. "This Sesshomaru shall sleep right here tonight."

"More like today," Miroku comments quietly, glancing out at the long-since-risen sun.

"Whatever," Sesshomaru sniffs, with more than a touch of hauteur. "What I meant was, I shall sleep right here until she awakens." He stretches out, curling his body in an arc around Rin's.

Many glances are exchanged. The rest of the company, except for Inuyasha, Kagome, and Kaede, trails to the back of the hut, settling down for a day of sleep. Jaken lies down in front of the fire, but his yellow orb eyes are watching Sesshomaru and Rin without blinking.

Inuyasha is dabbing at his puncture spot on his wrist, from where he helped save Sesshomaru's greatest treasure. Kagome wipes up some of the blood with another cloth, before she mutters something in his ear and follows the rest of the group.

Inuyasha watches her, hesitating. He looks tired but satisfied.

Sesshomaru stares at his little brother for a long moment. And then he speaks. "Inuyasha."

The hanyou casts a bleary gaze at his brother. "What now?"

"When we were quarreling, you accused this Sesshomaru of saying you were unfit to know what our father looked like."

"Yeah? What about it?"

Sesshomaru shifts weight on the floor next to Rin, draping an arm over her body. He gazes at her as he presents a great gift to his brother, as though drawing resolve from her sweet little soul in order to bestow that gift—the gift of precious knowledge: "You saw him…briefly…after the Sounga and Takimaru affair, when his ghost spoke to us. Nevertheless…Father was extremely tall. He walked with the gregariousness of a great loving gorilla. He ate entirely too much and embraced entirely too hard and his voice was like a thunderclap. He had a great respect for women and children...for women perhaps a bit too much, or at least, his taste for _variety_ in females got in the way of his better judgment…but anyway. A moon crescent adorned his forehead and he had only one magenta streak on each of his cheeks. He wore his hair back and up and his eyebrows were like mine, but thicker. His laugh was exactly like mine. However this Sesshomaru laughs far more rarely than he did. Perhaps if you are around and listen closely, you will hear his laugh coming from me."

Inuyasha is stunned, yet again. "I…arigato…Sessho-nii-sama."

"There is no need." Sesshomaru turns his head brusquely, signaling the end of the conversation. He listens as the bare feet of his little brother and first ever protective charge fade to the other side of the room.

But there is one more bit of gratitude he needs to express.

"Old woman," he murmurs.

"Hai, great dog demon?" The miko pauses by his side, where he lies against Rin's tiny body.

"Hear me: The next time that I love a child as I love her," and he nods at Rin, "her name will be Kaede."

Kikyo's little sister smiles, and bows her head suddenly. She swallows. "I see. Sleep well, milord." And she leaves him to his daughter.

Sesshomaru rests his head on the floorboards next to Rin's peacefully dozing face. And what will happen now? Now that his Rin is as immortal as he? Will it stop the constant worrying for her safety, her happiness, her wholeness? His fervent fear that she does not realize how much he cares, because it is not in his nature to show his emotions?

Never. Never will these concerns end. It's the blessing and curse of a true parent.

"Did you hear, small one? You have felled a great warrior." Sesshomaru's chin rests on Rin's shoulder, so slightly, so delicately. He whispers in her ear, now pointed, like his. "This Sesshomaru loves you. This Sesshomaru is at your mercy. Does it make you happy?"

"Itsumo," the child mumbles in her sleep. She turns her forehead against his, without really stirring. She trusts him so.

"Hai." He smiles that tranquil, infinitesimal smile into her yukata sleeve. His glazed, determined eyes soften. "Hai, forever."


	8. For Even Him

**Accountable **

**An InuYasha fanfiction**

**By Amber C.S.**

**Chapter 8: For Even Him **

**Two years later**

A brief and intense memory which will often be recited at Inu Clan dinner tables, after a little sake has been consumed:

Inuyasha lies dying.

Sesshomaru has come upon his little brother, his first charge, a moment too late.

A renegade youkai lord had attacked his little brother from behind, ravaged him, caught him off guard without Tessaiga in his hands.

And now Sesshomaru kneels over Inuyasha, and has Inuyasha at his mercy.

And has vowed to revive him from death itself.

"…You will only…slip away for a moment. Rin has told me it is much like sleeping, and forgetting how to awaken, when you pass over. And a light calls to you, and it makes you feel clean and refreshed, and…alert. And you open your eyes, and are back, because Tenseiga was that light. Rin has told me this. "

Rin.

Inuyasha loses the capacity to speak. He gurgles on the blood congealed in his throat. His eyes are so childlike that it is pitiful, this great young warrior now fallen. He tries to say something.

Sesshomaru positions himself under his little brother. His face is a stony mask as he slides a hand under Inuyasha's head, bracing it. Almost gently.

Because of Rin.

"There is no need. Simply sleep."

There is mistrust in the hanyou's eyes, and his brother knows whose fault that is. He knows, and acknowledges fully his poor judgment, now. He wonders if it will horrify their dead father to see Inuyasha pass over, if briefly, if temporarily, to the afterlife alongside him…their father, who really loved him too, if he was given Tenseiga by Inu no Taisho, and given Rin by Tenseiga.

Rin.

And if Inuyasha helped to save Rin, then perhaps there is some sort of filial devotion buried deep in little brother, that should not simply be brushed off, or discarded, this time around.

If because of Rin.

Rin, who is, in a way, everything.

"Inuyasha," Sesshomaru rumbles, "you will reawaken. You have my word. I promised you I would not raise a hand against Kagome-san, because of what you did for Rin. To allow you to die and not bring you back would be the greatest blow Kagome-san would receive. Do you understand?"

Inuyasha nods feverishly. But his eyelids become heavier. And then he is still.

Sesshomaru gazes down unreadably at his brother. His face slackens slowly. "At last in death…we do not fight…how…odd…to feel your trust, otouto-san," he murmurs down at that young face, with only traces of his father and himself in it, with so much of that human whore Izayoi in it. For a fleeting instant he thinks of breaking his word.

But no. There is no reason to revert to the ways of the past, once change, which is necessary, and inevitable, has come.

And Sesshomaru at last embraces his role as the favored son's elder brother and guardian with courage and pride. "Hoh. No. Do not fear, otoutu-san. Sesshomaru-sama is…here." He draws Tenseiga, this Life-Giving Perfection, and he slashes the demons of the nether world in halves, banishing them from his sibling's hide, preserving the blood of his blood. He protects. That has become his truest purpose. Because of Rin.

Inuyasha stirs. He mumbles to himself sleepily, like an over-exhausted little boy. He stirs and his nostrils curl in recognition of his big brother's scent. "Ew. I must be dreamin'."

"You dream of me often?" Sesshomaru is actually smiling, in an extremely wry manner. He cocks an eyebrow at Inuyasha, whose eyes pop indignantly open.

"Gross." Little brother sits up, completely healed, completely new and clean. He brushes himself off and ignores Sesshomaru's quiet thunderous chuckling. He looks down at his torso, no longer diced into gruesome segments. "…hey, Sesshomaru…"

Sesshomaru abruptly goes sober. "There is no need. Now we are even."

"…yeah, okay. But…"

"Get up. Can you?"

"COURSE I can!" Inuyasha hoists himself to his feet, no doubt the better to deny death its triumph. He teeters and promptly falls on his hindside.

Sesshomaru makes no comment, but puts his hands under his brother's arms and hoists him to his feet. And steps back.

"Wow," Inuyasha mutters. "Déjà vu."

"What was that?" Sesshomaru is right behind him.

Like always before.

His truest calling.

"…Nothin'," Inuyasha mumbles. "Must be nice to…always have a purpose…"

"Inuyasha, it was you who called my attention to the need to protect someone. To become a great warrior. And it was father who asked me for whom I was accountable. He asked me whom I protected. Now shut up and walk."

Inuyasha can't help grinning broadly, and he has no idea why, because he is sore and he just saw death. But having a relentless, if antisocial, if arrogant, if even slightly hostile, protector, is strangely comforting. "One step at a time…" he mumbles, remembering being a chubby faced child with an awe-striking older brother at a bath house, remembering the first time that Sesshomaru taught him this lesson. "So when's she gonna get married to Sango's brother, Sessho-nii-chan?"

"Who? And do not call me that."

"Your kid. Rin."

"Do not rush things, baka. Simply focus on..."

"One step at a time. Yeah I know. I had a wicked skillful teacher."

"...heh, hmph. That is for certain."

And together they walk home.


	9. I Have Always

**Accountable **

**An InuYasha fanfiction**

**By Amber C.S.**

**Chapter 9: I Have Always**

_well i want you to notice  
to notice when i'm not around  
and know that your eyes see straight through me  
and speak to me without a sound_

_i want to hold you  
protect you from all of the things I've already endured  
I want to show you  
Show you all the things that this life has in store for you  
I'll always love you  
the way that a father should love his daughter_

_when i walked out this morning  
i cried as i walked to the door  
i cried about how long i'd be away for  
i cried about leaving you all alone_

_sweet zoe jane  
so i wanted to say this  
cause i wouldn't know where to begin  
to explain to you what i have been through  
to explain where your daddy has been Stain'd_

**Ten years later. **

Today is the day that Rin and Kohaku are to be wed.

The enormous estate that Sesshomaru has furnished for his daughter and only heir has been decorated to the hilt with sakura blossoms, pearls, gold, and a fairly ostentatious number of live, waddling peacocks and cranes.

Rin and Kohaku have been betrothed by Sesshomaru since Rin was fourteen. So many years in each other's company, edging gently and bravely together into the terrifying and painful place called adulthood, with Sesshomaru as their protector, made the match quite a pleasant one for the both of them.

Kohaku has often called Rin his redemption. Sesshomaru has always shrewdly gazed down at the dark-haired, freckle-faced boy at this declaration, nodded, and rumbled, "Hai, just that."

Kohaku has not seen Sesshomaru-sama today. He has seen much of Rin, who mingles the joy of a child and the grace of a woman with incomprehensible allure. Rin, whom he adores—for whom he has Sesshomaru to thank. He remembers a moment shared by Sesshomaru and the now quite elderly Kaede-sama, several months ago when the wedding date was announced. The old woman's face crinkled into a wise smile and she lay a brazen hand on Sesshomaru's famous regrown left arm. "And all because of ye, proud inu daiyoukai. When my sister bade me destroy the shikon no tama along with her burning body, I lost my childhood forever. Ye protected theirs, and gave them a chance to find each other, and be whole."

Sesshomaru had only cleared his throat and scowled fiercely ahead. But he had not bucked Kaede's arm off his shoulder. Inuyasha had made some remark about objects obstructing his brother's anus. Rin, ready to politely defend her father, had asked what a "stick up the hole" exactly meant, Kohaku had blushed, and Kagome had lamented that the Beads of Subjugation no longer existed, while bouncing her firstborn son with the loudmouthed dog demon, Sota, on her lap. Jaken had helplessly fumed, Miroku and Shippo had snickered and Sango had rolled her eyes.

But yes…it is Rin for whom Kohaku _must_ thank Sesshomaru today.

Kohaku comes upon his longtime guardian, who never forsook him even when he was no better than a burden and the wasted remains of one of Naraku's damaged souls. His guardian and his sensei, who spared his life even when he deserved to have it taken, when he was not in his right mind, when Kohaku attacked Rin over a decade ago. His guardian, whom many have accused of very wrong things, of heartlessness and indifference, of cold-bloodedness—things Kohaku knows for a fact, from experience, are untrue.

But the proof of his guardian's compassion is, today, startlingly blatant. Sesshomaru-sama is doing something very…uncharacteristic. Something strangely sentimental, and…almost compulsive.

The great dog demon is making wreaths of flowers.

Hundreds and hundreds of wreaths, of thousands and thousands of sun-drizzle yellow flowers. Rin's favorite things in the world.

He sits on his forelegs, rigid of posture, his long-nailed hands crafting these flowers into rings which he then tosses on Rin's bed, on her dresser, on the round sill of her window, all over her chamber.

Kohaku realizes it as a gesture of acknowledgment of a rite of passage into Rin's full womanhood. An embracing and a letting go, by a devoted father.

The human boy's eyes well up with tears. But he swallows them back and wipes his freckled face quickly. He opens his mouth to speak.

But his soon-to-be father-in-law anticipates him, as always. "As if I do not know your scent by now. What is it, Kohaku?" Sesshomaru rumbles, his back turned to the boy. He pauses only a moment when he realizes he has been caught red-handed at his sentimental gesture. Then, with his usual lofty pride, he continues to fashion the flower garlands. His back is still to the young man.

Kohaku feels a dopey smile crossing his face. "It is a lovely thing to do for Sesshomaru-sama's daughter," he murmurs, crossing his hands behind his back.

"Do not mumble. Have confidence, boy. And do not evade this Sesshomaru's question." The inu daiyoukai prince tosses another garland on Rin's futon. He sniffs and turns to face his male charge at last.

His tone is not truly scolding, not beyond a gentle fashion, that is. Kohaku is so used to it by now that it is almost comforting, that grave and thunderous voice, that soft chastising and pragmatic instruction in the ways of manhood.

The young groom tries to stop grinning, and he stammers over his words for a moment. For some reason the way his guardian narrows his golden eyes in scrutiny at him only makes him grin harder. Sesshomaru constantly scowls like that, even at the people he loves, and Kohaku finds even that comforting and endearing—and so he smiles all the more at how strange but true this is. "Oh ah, hai, milord, I …! It was just….I wanted….I wanted to thank you. And speak to you of the past in doing so."

"Kohaku-kun is a good boy, and need not seek the approval of this Sesshomaru at this interval. You already have my blessing, as you well know."

"No, no, milord, I know this. It's not that. It's just…for all the times that you saved my Rin's life…"  
"OUR Rin's life…" Sesshomaru bristles a bit proprietarily.

"Hai, OUR Rin's life…"

The dog demon's eyes avert to the window. "Do not be alarmed. It is only that the day is painful to me as well as joyful. I accept your thanks. But it is only sensible that I did what I did. She is this Sesshomaru's very heartstrings, you see."

"I know, milord. I know."

"Do you? And how?"

Kohaku cannot help but be shocked. "Is that a serious question, Sesshomaru-sama?"

Sesshomaru's mokomoko puffs up slightly around a brilliantly red and white, ornately embroidered honeycomb crest kimono, that of a youkai lord and of the father of the bride. He looks like a bird of prey with its feathers ruffled. "Of _course_ it is."

"Why…Sesshomaru-sama…_everyone_ knows that you love Rin. That she…caused you to grow. That you are…that you are softer…those were Kagome-chan's very words to Kouga-san's minions, one day many years ago…that you are softer because of Rin. That you know mercy and kindness, and do not see them as weaknesses anymore. In fact…that…" Kohaku gulps. "That these things have become central to your every purpose, milord. Everyone knows that you love Rin."

"Do they know how much?" Sesshomaru fully stops making flower garlands. He turns his whole torso to Kohaku. His hands form fists. "Do they?"

Kohaku has no answer for this. He is a little startled at his master's sudden furor.

"Let me tell you then, Kohaku, because I am so poor at telling, at showing, anyone. Hai, I shall tell you, her husband, her new constant companion." Sesshomaru's face is not quite expressive, but it is tight and pale, and it shakes slightly as he testifies. It seems to strain the every cell of this stoic, taciturn being to speak about such an emotional topic so loquaciously. "Do you remember when we were in hell, and this Sesshomaru was selfishly trying to strengthen the Tenseiga's defensive powers, and gave no account to Rin's life in that brief period? Well, Kohaku…when Rin nearly died forever, when Tenseiga could not revive her a second time, I felt the weight of a thousand worlds crushing me. And suddenly the feeling of all that ever lived came to me—all the pain, all the suffering, which I wanted nothing more than to _erase_—_for all of them_. The dead of hell called to me for healing—and I gave it. I gave it to them. I, no god, no master, but a man grieving his child. When I felt my most powerless was when I had my greatest power. And the dead found release. Because I knew how they must have felt. To lose Rin was to die, after all. That is…how much, you see. How much I…" His voice trails, and he clears his throat, and finishes: "And when Rin came back to me…I felt I must have known the joy of their release as well. Hai. It was Rin who taught me compassion, indeed."

A long and strangely serene silence follows.

Kohaku speaks into it, almost reluctant to shatter that elysian peace. "It pains you, doesn't it? You feel it would be impossible to show such a love in your actions and words."

Sesshomaru stares directly into Kohaku's eyes for a long gauging moment. "Hai," he finally says, offering a supreme show of trust to this human boy.

"I can't begin to imagine it, milord. I was trapped in a body that would not let me show how I felt for only a few years, when Naraku controlled me. You have been arrested…contained…this way…all your life."

"You will tell her. You will tell her for me."

Kohaku descends to his knees and bows his head, touching his forehead to the floorboards. "Humbly, milord, I suggest…that you tell Rin what you have told me…yourself."

Sesshomaru growls quietly. "I cannot," he snaps.

Kohaku peers up at his guardian, his dark eyes warm. "You can slay demons ten times your size. You can protect a brother that you find impossible to tolerate. You can give back an orphaned child…two orphaned children…" Tears prick at his eyes again and he fights them while pointing to his own chest "…their happiness and their hope, quite literally single-handedly. I believe you can do anything, Lord Sesshomaru."

Another silence.

Sesshomaru closes his eyes and inhales deeply. He opens them and reaches down to Kohaku. "Sit up. Your sleeves are crooked. And your collar is wrapped right over left instead of left over right. Foolish boy, what would you do were I not watchful?"

Kohaku has to listen closely to hear the note of gruffness in his father figure's voice, but he hears it. It is the only way he can tell that Sesshomaru is touched, aside the masked tenderness in the way the great dog demon refastens the ornate collar of his wedding kimono. "I believe I would not have amounted to much at all without such watchfulness, milord," he replies. "…Sesshomaru-sama, you are…worth…learning the hard-to-see hints to your heart. Arigato…a thousand times…for giving Rin and me back our childhood. And our lives."

Sesshomaru's breathing is the slightest bit erratic. His face is frozen in the eternal stone-mask. But his eyes are quite bright and he says, after loudly swallowing, "Fool, you would make a great orator, but you are making it difficult for me to retain my dignity. Be off, go and prepare for your wedding. I wonder that your sister does not fawn over you weeping and wailing at this hour. Go see to her and tell her to keep her hiraikotsu strapped down."

"Hai, tous-sama."

Sesshomaru jolts at the title. Then he scowls at being caught even further off guard. "Imp," he grunts.

Merriment and mischief gathers at the corners of Kohaku's eyes. His freckles stand out against a blush as he leaps to his feet, bows, and scurries off.

Sesshomaru waits until he is gone to close his eyes again and collect his "dignity."

Those eyes are decidedly dry again when another young male charge's brassy blare enters the room. "OI, ONII-SAMA! WHERE'D'JA HAVE JAKEN STASH THE WEDDING FOOD? An' where IS Jaken? Didja tie him up and hide him in some closet so he wouldn't crash the ceremony? HA!"

Oh ancestors. Patience.

Sesshomaru counts to ten. Then twenty. At about thirty-six, he is fairly sure he won't commit fratricide. Fairly.

"Inuyasha, please either die or quit behaving in a manner that invites trouble, so that I can stop worrying about your idiotic hide. Also, my eardrums will want to function during the ceremony. So kindly shut up."

Little brother is dressed in a formal Inu Clan honeycombed kimono of the usual bright, flashy, hot-colored manner. It is just like Sesshomaru's attire, in fact, only a bit louder. Like him. He swaggers bow-leggedly into Rin's bedchamber. Gods, at least he isn't _barefoot _today.

Which is probably strictly foresight on Kagome-san's part.

"MAKE me," is Inuyasha's infinitely mature retort. "And congratulations to the happy papa-sama and the blushin' bride, by the way. Kagome sent me in here to say that."

Yes. All Kagome-san. His brother would probably have accidentally blown himself up with a Kaze no Kizu if it weren't for the spunky and level headed human girl whom Inuyasha had finally married.

"Oh, I would be glad to," Sesshomaru promises stupid otouto-chan, arching an eyebrow. He stands. "And I accept your congratulations on Rin's behalf. And I will slice your head open now, alright? It will ease my stress. Alright, let us have at it. Never fear, I shall just revive you with Tenseiga afterward so as to not damper this happy occasion with your inconvenient demise…hoh, wait, I already did that about seven years ago, when you were bested by one of my opponent youkai lords. Never mind. I guess you shall be staying dead this time…"

Inuyasha winces. "Yeah, yeah, don't remind me about that time. Kagome almost had some kinda breakdown about me …gettin' offed…even though you…brought me back…ANYWAY ano…stress. HA you stressed! Yeah. Kinda like when you went to Kagome in a total PANIC and flung Rin at her and were all like 'OH ANCESTORS, FIX MAH BABY,' when Rin turned twelve and had her first…YOU know…time of the MONTH…"

Sesshomaru glares. His magenta-streaked cheeks poof out like those of an affronted puffer-fish. "Crawl away and die, Inuyasha."

"BAHAA, OOooooo, owch!" The little brother brays a laugh. For once they both know Sesshomaru doesn't mean it. Though neither of them will just blanketly admit that he finds their détente a comforting and relieving fact.

"Ano…" Sesshomaru's lip quirks as a return jibe occurs to him. "Hai, well, granted, such an ERROR on this Sesshomaru's part."

"…_huh_?" Inuyasha nearly has a stroke at the shock of this statement.

Which Sesshomaru anticipated. He skewers: "Oh, hai, hai, otouto-kun, I should have taken her to YOU, seeing as you have the equivalent of what your modern miko calls 'pee-emm-esss' every new moon. Very like an adolescent girl. HOH!"

Inuyasha is beaten. He scowls. "…Keh."

Pause. Stare.

Neither brother was ever particularly a champion of small talk.

Crickets.

"Kagome's pregnant again," Inuyasha blurts, into the silence. "Ano...er...So yay."

"Hmph. Poor girl. What will you name it?"

"If it's a girl, we're thinkin' about calling it Kaede."

Sesshomaru gives a little jolt. The name he promised to give in tribute to Kikyo's little sister, who helped him save Rin's life…the name he promised would be held by the next child he loved as he loves Rin. Strange. Of all the sources for such a child…

"Woah." Inuyasha arches an eyebrow. "What was _that_ face for?"

"What was what? Really, Inuyasha. I know less and less often what you are talking about." Sesshomaru grunts, cracking his fingers.

Inuyasha rolls his eyes, but unconsciously mimics the gesture. Then he points one of his snapping philanges at the many garlands adorning Rin's room. "What are all these yellow flowers for? …Aw. Jeez, Sesshomaru. Decorating Rin's bed on her final morning as a single gal. Yer a bona fide softie, daaaaaddy, ahah, awww…Got the growin' pains?"

"I am amazed you had the brain capacity to figure it out," Sesshomaru sniffs. He averts his eyes and tries valiantly to maintain the temperate color in his cheeks. They are hot, though, so he suspects he has failed at the task. "You are still so painfully dumb."

"Yeah, and yer an asshole still too," Inuyasha spits back. "An' a windbag. An' a…a…big stupid fluffy _poodle_…"

"Would you shut up already? How your lips flap."

"_Ain't gonna_! Don't holdjer _breath_, ha!"

"Do not say 'ain't.' I know for a fact that you were brought up on good grammar by that mother of yours."

"Oh YEAH? Well…yeah…"

They glare half-heartedly at each other to keep up appearances.

However both are fighting smiles at the same time. Neither brother is really able to produce the venomous barbs of the past. A great deal of healing occurs in the period of a decade.

"Speakin' of my mother…"  
"I do not have her fan from father with me at the present time." This is almost snapped.

"…Wasn't gonna ask for it. Was just sayin'….this place ya built for Rin…our dad…and what he did for my mom, a human girl…to protect her…"

"I would do anything for Rin." Sesshomaru pledges this abruptly, in part to detract from the very obvious comparison being made between the home Inu no Taisho fashioned for Izayoi, and the home he fashioned for his daughter. "Anyway, are you making some sort of perverted allegation there? Rin is not my kept whore. She is my…"

"Noooo. Jeez. Yer daughter, yer little girl, I understand. Would ya drop dead of shock if I said I hoped to pattern how I raise the girl baby after how ya raised Rin?"

"…No, I would not die of shock to hear this, but only so that you are not satisified."

More customary, but oddly friendly, glaring.

At this point Rin slips into the room fully garbed for her wedding. At first, unguardedly, she rushes at Sesshomaru as though dancing. "PAPA-SAMA, I am SO EXCITED…! Oh! Gomen!" She blushes at the sight of Inuyasha's presence, and averts her eyes, hands folded in front of her, until the two heads of the family have stopped sparring.

Inuyasha grins at her."Y'look really pretty, Rin-chan. I'm goin', no worries. HEY, you." He grunts at his brother.

Sesshomaru grunts back. "Inuyasha, calm down. Do not bellow at me like a fishwife. Tell Kagome to limit your intake of sucrose."

"Sucra-WHAT?"

"Sugar, moron. Sugar."

"Stupid onii-chan, go chat it up with your kid."

"Stupid otouto-kun, do not call me that, and go find your pregnant wife and son a seat for the ceremony."

"Fine."

"Fine."

"KEH."

"HMMMph."

"_WOOF_!" Rin squeals into the conversation. Quite incongruously, she wags her elegantly kimonoed bottom, where an invisible tail exists.

Both dog demons gawk at her.

"What?" She smiles innocently. "I wanted to make an animal noise too. I always wanted a tail…I was sad that I did not grow one when I acquired demon blood!"

Inuyasha and Sesshomaru turn to each other.

And burst out laughing.

"HOH," Sesshomaru barks, that single tacit acknowledgment of something worthily humorous, so fleeting that he himself seems to miss that he laughed in the first place—while Inuyasha's more dancing, frantic snickering peppers the ensuing silence.

"Hee." Rin bows to the both of them. "Thank you for the well wishes, Inuyasha-sama."

"Hoh, do not call _him_ 'sama,'" Sesshomaru scoffs.

"Give _him _copious chocolate, kay, Rin? Just a little friendly poisoning." Inuyasha musters a drop of his noble blood to bend over Rin's hand with a surprising degree of elegance, and to kiss it. Then he waves at them both jovially and struts out into the audience chamber by the shrine where the ceremony will occur.

Rin doesn't waste much time realizing exactly what Sesshomaru has been doing. "I shall wear them ALL," she cries, voice a bit watery with the surging emotions of the day's occasion. And then quite deliberately she begins to don every single wreath that Sesshomaru has made. She dances around, arms extended at her sides, as ever seeing herself the butterfly eternally taking flight.

He struggles not to smile, chest bridling. He has never been one to discourage her childlike lack of inhibition. Hang what the other lords and courtiers say. She is _his_ child. To be tame would ill suit her. "This Sesshomaru attempted to make them true circles, but fears that some may be ellipses or something still more amoebic."

"I LOVE them! You had to work hard to be patient for a task like this, didn't you? Seeing as it is my task usually to gather our flowers! You know…We are so different, you and I! A demon, a human—hai, a hanyou now—quiet and talkative, sober and playful. But we are a great team, aren't we, Papa-sama?" Rin straightens the frothy, verdant yellow chain, which had gone crooked on her head with her dancing.

Sesshomaru just stares down at her. Very slowly, that smile surfaces on his face, that dry little smile, which, to Rin, is still one of the rarest and most precious things in the world to behold. It's contagious, reflected in her face with a fresh exuberance, as if she is still a child of seven years. She giggles and her eyes, gold now because of the demon blood he gave her so many years earlier, sparkle and shift up to his. Such softness and warmth in her father's gaze, which no one else would believe coming from Sesshomaru-sama of the Western Lands.

"What is it?" Rin finally asks, wrapping her arms around the daiyoukai's waist.

"I was simply wondering…"

"What, what, Papa-sama? Come, come, tell me!" She laughs again, like the sound of rain on tin, a silvery, high, free sound, thumping her palms playfully against his back.

Sesshomaru chuckles—something else that only Rin can get out of him. It's like the rolling and distant thunder to that rain. "Hohoh, peace. This Sesshomaru was wondering when his Rin first called him Papa-sama aloud."

Her answer is assured and ready, clear in her memory. "It was the morning after you saved me…for the hundredth or so time, hee. The morning I became hanyou, and woke up in Papa-sama's arms, with his forehead against mine, and Papa-sama told me what had happened. You did not need to apologize as you did, Papa-sama. I did not wish to see tears in your eyes, never. So I called you 'Papa-sama' for the first time, right then, to stop the tears."

"You are wrong, Rin. I _did_ need to apologize." Sesshomaru's gaze, his ethereal, youthful, unchanged face, all constrict somehow. A strain. When he had apologized to Rin for that accidental blow from his sword, and Inuyasha's…when everyone else was asleep, or outside old Kaede's hut…he had finally reverted to a state not experienced since he was a small child stomping down the hated perfection of snow outside his parents' home.

He had cried.

Nothing loud, or dramatic. Nothing maudlin, or vehement. In fact it was only one tear that even escaped the brim of his eyes and somberly, silently drizzled down his smooth alabaster cheek. Two in total, and the other remained welled up along his golden iris, unfallen. "I did. And do. Now."

Rin remembers more the unsteady breathing, the near silent mumble of "hoh, please, Rin, gomenasai," the agony in Papa-sama's eyes, more than the single tear itself, that morning ten years ago. Right now, he almost looks as if he is about to do it again. Eternally sweet, she reaches up and places her two soft hands on each side of his face and pledges, "_Papa_-sama, I promise, I don't want to hear you _say_ such things…!"

"You never knew, Rin. You simply followed me on faith. You never _knew_, and you deserved more than that…"

"I wanted nothing more than to follow you. You were my whole world. You were my whole family, Papa-sama…"

He continues relentlessly, almost angrily, in a fierce and cold whisper. "All through your childhood, your adolescence. All the things you gave up that a human girl should be able to enjoy. Common comforts. Safeties. Simply to follow me, and you never knew. I have never before found cause to be disgusted with _myself_."

"Never knew _what_?" Near panic enters Rin's doe-like eyes.

"That I…that…for a long time…as far as this Sesshomaru could…remember…I have never said…never made it clear, even, in my face or my actions, that…" Very uneven breathing, now, but it is not as if Sesshomaru is going to cry. It's as if he is ready to burst, to scream out in agonized frustration, that he is incapacitated and inferior in this one way, this one damned way, of showing emotions, as ever, as _ever_…! "I…cannot…I _cannot_…what I mean…it does not come…even now…I am inu daiyoukai, but it does not _come_…" His claws constrict into fists at his sides, digging into the flesh, bleeding, anchoring himself with the physical pain so that the emotional obstruction, the bottled frustration, does not overtake him.

"Papa-sama…oh. _Papa_. You are so very wrong."

So warm, and gentle, and forgiving, little Rin's voice. So different from his own and it guides and teaches him even now, his daughter's voice. And Rin watches Sesshomaru's eyes squeeze closed as though wracked with pain and stoically enduring it. And she vows to herself to be the healer and savior this time…simply by telling the truth:

"…I have always known that you love me, Papa."

Slowly, fiercely staring into his face, Rin pulls Sesshomaru's great, powerful silvery head down to her level.

"Always."

She kisses the moon crescent on his forehead—where there is a scar, hidden for years, from that first time that Sesshomaru ever took someone as a protective charge, the eager child Inuyasha, and taught him a battle move.

"Always."

And a second time, she kisses it.

"Always. In every single movement and breath, you showed that to me. I knew. And still do." Rin's voice trembles now. "Papa, I will always need you. Please know that. I wish only that I could give back even the smallest portion of the…security…and the happiness you gave me by coming into my life. I…everyone left. Everyone died. Everyone…! I could not speak before you came and looked at me, and made me feel like I mattered again. I know how you feel, Papa, to be unable to speak your feelings, but to feel them still. Before you…I was a lost cause."

"So was I." Sesshomaru's eyes do not open, but the lids slacken. He nods, once. He rests his head, ever so lightly, on Rin's delicate shoulder. "This Sesshomaru's daughter…Rin…Rin is the reward which cannot be surpassed. You are my greatest honor. My gift."

_Daughter_. Rin cradles her powerful father's head in her arms and it is her turn to cry. She cries from a place that is deep-entrenched, profound, both devastating and exuberant, from the core, from the past, for moments exquisite and fleeting and forever gone. For moments yet to come. She cries for a love that she is amazed to see she really must somehow be good enough to deserve. For a love so great and infinite that it overwhelms her. A parent's love, which she wishes she could never lose. And in a way, never will. "I love you, too, Papa," she chokes.

When Sesshomaru turns his head to look into his daughter's eyes, his face is as blank as ever—to someone who does not look closely, to someone who does not know the every subtle, evanescent feeling that crosses his face. But Rin is a very good looker. She sees the devotion in that face, and always has. Rin knows how very hard her father tries. "Rin must not cry on her wedding day because of this Sesshomaru," he rumbles. His nose nudges her wet cheek in a canine fashion. He pauses. Then a distinctly naughty glimmer enters his expression. "Rin must also tell Kohaku-kun that he must be a perfect husband, and if he hurts Rin, this Sesshomaru will transform into an enormous dog and devour him."

This successfully shatters Rin's cathartic impasse. "PAPA-SAMA!" she squeals indignantly, and it dissolves into joyful giggles once again.

"My favorite sound," he comments, kissing her wet cheek with the faintness of a feathertip.

"Shall we?" A shy voice from the doorway.

Sesshomaru and Rin turn in synchronization to gaze at the speaker—Kohaku.

"Kohaku," says the girl, the girl becoming a woman, with garlands of yellow flowers around her neck and on her head, "you know I will not wear that veil-hat thing and claim deference to you." She's doing that thing with her voice, that thing where she is attempting to sound sly and coming across only adorably puckish.

"Surely Rin-ko does not think her Kohaku-ko would ask such a thing of her," the boy becoming a man, wearing trailing and heavy groom's robes on his still-slender form, retorts. He pads sheepishly back into the room. "Only that she never leave my side, that she have patience with her mere human husband."

"There is nothing 'mere' about you," Sesshomaru scolds, with a severe look that Kohaku rightly reads, somehow, as fond. "Stop deriding yourself or I shall be angered deeply. And Rin will cherish you anyway, because it is essential to Rin to cherish. Period. Now the two of you shall process to the shrine of my father, and to the shrine of Kohaku's father, and you shall be purified and drink sake and recite your vows, in the proper Shinto fashion. And we shall allow Miroku-houshi-sama to recite some of his Buddhist mantras, since he is married to Rin's sister-in-law Sango-san, and bless your heads. And Inuyasha shall overindulge in sake, and I shall find him amusingly stupid. And we shall all be extraordinarily and exquisitely happy. This Sesshomaru orders it." He turns his head sharply, with a brusque sniff. "Now leave, would you, boy, and take the most beautiful of things that I have ever beheld out of my sight with you, without her veil, to be sure. And allow this Sesshomaru to descend to a place lesser in her mind than her husband's and to 'age gracefully,' as the saying goes."

He breathes as evenly as possible into the poignant silence that follows. Nostalgia threatens to suffocate him inside. He hides it expertly outside.

His two treasured wards, whom he feels have been torn, just slightly at the seams, away from him by this life passage, murmur to each other. Then sweet little hands, hands he will always immediately recognize, slip into his own. There is the sound of wood sliding on wood as Rin removes her shoes and stands, just socked, on Sesshomaru's feet, far larger, clothed in the closed-toed fashion of the Chinese mainland. Rin rests her head on Sesshomaru's chest, where his heart is. She closes her eyes, sublimely serene.

Kohaku puts his hand on his bride-to-be's back, but does not further interfere. His expression is perceptive and gentle as ever.

"What are you doing?" Sesshomaru feels his ivory cheeks simply explode with color. And he does not care, for once. Because he already knows exactly what she is doing.

"Sing something, Kohaku," Rin trills. "Papa-sama and I must dance, as we have always done. I cannot be married until we have had our dance."

"I would be glad to, my love," Kohaku breathes in her ear, before stepping back.

Sesshomaru tosses his hair like a regal stallion, and glares at the ceiling. His father told him many years ago that it is a sure way of keeping tears at bay, if one suddenly lost one's impenetrable capacity to never cry.

Which definitely seems to be his dilemma today. Curious.

Sesshomaru wonders if Inu no Taisho with his bizarre sense of humor isn't laughing lovingly down at his eldest son from the heavens, at his dilemma. If Inu no Taisho isn't somehow invoking the tears spiritually.

Blessed old bastard. Sesshomaru almost smiles at the thought, and he blames that on his father's devoted ghost as well.

Kohaku hums a well known Japanese folk tune, lips closed in a broad freckly smile, and steps back even more, swaying to the beat. Shortly father and daughter follow suit, in a soft waltz round the room. For a long time, neither speaks.

"….Rin." Sesshomaru manages to say his child's name. The way he says that name, and always has, the way it quietly encapsulates the whole universe in one light, short syllable, has always been it's owner's greatest comfort.

She responds to that sound, of her name said by her guardian and father, by smiling up at him delightedly. "What is papa-sama looking for? Peekaboo, great dog demon! Rin-chan is down here." She giggles.

Sesshomaru's head snaps down and his eyes lock with Rin's once more.

"I love you."

The words come out almost of their own accord, and sloppily, and almost too quietly to be audible.

Sesshomaru has said them though. He has conquered his greatest adversary at last—his own emotional remoteness. And Sesshomaru fights only the strongest of adversaries.

He stops dancing to peer down at her, to make sure she heard. At the same time he knows he cannot say it again, not at the moment. Too close to the enormity of emotions that might overwhelm him fully, to say it a second time.

Rin has heard. She nods, and closes her eyes again. "Papa-sama, in his many conquests, and wanderings, and despite his many empires, will always come back?" she whispers, while stepping off his feet, and back into Kohaku's arms. "He will never leave this Rin-chan? No matter how vexing I may be?"

"I will always come back for Rin, who is herself this Sesshomaru's mighty heart."

Rin giggles again, through misty eyes.

Sesshomaru almost does not care why. After all, it really is his favorite sound. But he asks, "What is it?"

"That is good, because Kohaku and I wish to have a child very soon. And you shall be ojiisan!"

Sesshomaru's face feels cold.

"You are pale, papa-sama!" His daughter covers her mouth to muffle her laughter now. Various wedding guests peek into her quarters to see what is holding up the ceremony, and Kohaku waves them off, grinning.

"Ano… words fail me." The Lord of the Western Lands merely cocks an eyebrow. "Hmph. I am pleased to hear it, you know."

"Hai," says Rin, giving Kohaku one hand, and Sesshomaru the other. She squeezes that other hand. "Hai, papa. I know."

Sesshomaru squeezes her hand back. He won't be letting go for a long time.


	10. Epilogue: Full Circle

**Accountable **

**An InuYasha fanfiction**

By Amber C.S.

_Author's Note: The character of Kaede the Second is (c) K. Melchior and used with permission. Thanks for the rpg's, K-chan!_

_This has been a really fun project, and some of the interactions have deep personal significance to me. I'm sorry to say it's over with this chapter, but I hope everyone has enjoyed reading!_

**10: Epilogue--Full Circle.**

**Five years after the events of Chapter 9.**

Sesshomaru comes upon her around seven in the morning, as he rises from bed early in anticipation of Rin's delivery date for her very first child. It has taken several more years than Rin and Kohaku anticipated to conceive a child, but they have finally done so, and the day of meeting their new baby is upon them. Sesshomaru maintains stoic calm, the center of the storm as ever, the anchor for them both.

On the inside, Sesshomaru the mighty is absolutely terror-stricken.

As are all men of all ages, eras, classes, and races, at a woman in childbirth.

But anyway.

He comes upon the child with the name that he had predicted as that of the next child he would love as much as he loves Rin, on this very day.

Kaede the Second.

It is the first time they have ever been in close proximity to each other—mainly because Inuyasha has been reluctant to allow his occasionally cold-hearted, homicidal brother around his offspring. In part, also, because, though he has maintained admirable civility with his younger sibling, Sesshomaru is still far too different from Inuyasha to be around him more than a day at a time without a quarrel erupting. Still…Inuyasha has proven an excellent father. Something else Sesshomaru keeps to himself, but sincerely feels, is pride in his little half-brother's parenting skills.

The child called Kaede has been furnished by one of the dojo servants with a chamber off of Sesshomaru's war strategy conference room. He is mildly amused at the location, but says nothing, as he watches Inuyasha's daughter and second-born, one Kaede, work on her calligraphy.

Her hair is just like his hair, and his brother's on any time but a new moon—long, silken strands of silver-white, with undiscerning bangs hanging over warm chocolate-gold eyes the color of her mother Kagome's.

Her ears are like her uncle's—small and pointed at the tip.

Sesshomaru is glad for the child that she does not have her father's ridiculous white dog ears.

Then he is surprised at himself for being happy on the child's behalf.

But there is something about Kaede that draws Sesshomaru towards her. The recognition of a compatible soul. That is the only way he can describe it, even to himself. It seems the time has come again for him to protect, and be accountable for, someone.

He stands in the doorway of the modest writing room off of his meeting hall for some time, silently brooding at the little girl, his waterfall of luminescent hair stirred by the occasional draft through the palace.

Kaede gives no indication that she recognizes his presence.

At least an hour passes before a tiny, thin, colorless voice emitting from the child states, "Uncle Sesshomaru-sama is making this Kaede-chan nervous by staring over her shoulder."

Sesshomaru catches himself smiling instantaneously, and flattens his features. As the years have passed, his relentless effort at stoicism has gradually decreased. "I see. Unfortunate. Then I shall join you." He proceeds into the room soundlessly.

"Arigato, milord."

"There is no need." He seats himself across from her, and continues to observe her.

"…Sessho-ojisama, there is little difference between staring over my shoulder and at my face. I still feel as though I am a fish in a bowl." The child's pointed ears redden. She stops painting words and images on her scroll, and sits there as though rendered immobile.

And oh, Sesshomaru knows how it is. How it is to be her. The eyes that fear to meet anyone else's. The sentiments that are kept tirelessly at bay. The automatism that feels safe. "Gomen, honored niece," he rumbles, and actually means it.

Kaede the Second's eyes lift from their self-mulling depths, and rise to the level of his nose. Not to Sesshomaru's own eyes. Not for an instant. "It is alright. It is not my place to chastise my greatly honored uncle."

"Your manners are impeccable," he comments. He brushes hair out of the path of his double-magenta-streaked cheek. "What is it you are painting?"

The child speaks with un-childlike precision and crispness. "I am painting honored cousin Rin-chan. I am painting her because she is wonderful, and has done many things that I wish to do." She sniffs, rubbing her miniscule nose and getting ink on it.

"Hai, that she is. And that she has." Paternal instinct, which seems to never go away once it has awakened, sparks inside Sesshomaru. He reaches unthinkingly to correct the smudge.

But he has forgotten, now, how it was for him before, for so many years—how much he had recoiled from, feared, the caring touch of any other living thing.

For Kaede, that struggle has just begun.

And so the reaching is a mistake.

Kaede's hooded, blank eyes spark to frightened life. She jerks back from the touch, by some self-containing instinct. At this sudden jolt of startled energy, the table jitters and the bottle of ink spills all over the painting, Kaede, and Sesshomaru.

Sesshomaru gazes thoughtfully down at the black on his outrageously expensive kimono. "Hoh," he grunts, realizing many things at once.

Kaede meanwhile stuffs her hands into her mouth and makes a strangled noise. She rocks back and forth, whimpering, clammy and pale.

A mistake, an imperfection—unforgivable, somehow, to the child.

Sesshomaru feels like he is watching himself through a glass into the past. Himself, as a little hanyou girl.

"_No no no no_," Kaede is mumbling, while rocking.

Sesshomaru does not reach for the child again at first. He shifts weight, stands, and moves the empty ink bottle and messed upon scroll out of the way. He disregards the black mess on the floor and on himself. He kneels again directly beside Kaede, against her, giving her body his warmth, but not smothering her. Then he waits.

The child's rocking slows down quite slowly.

"It is alright," Sesshomaru murmurs. "I know. I know."

Kaede's eyes are jeweled with tears as she looks at his hands, folded serenely in his lap. Hands that have slain thousands. Powerful, graceful hands. "Nnn.. no.."

"Hai, I do. Kaede. Let us be stronger for it by trying again." Sesshomaru's Poison Claw ribbon of venom charges up electrically in his right forefinger. "I shall paint something."

"How?" the child hiccups, still gazing desolately at his hands.

Sesshomaru does not answer, but begins to use his venom whip to etch a crude drawing of a large, flop-eared dog into the dried black ink. "Hoh, dreadful. But I tried. I resemble a rabbit instead of an inu daiyoukai, do I not?"

Kaede blinks. She leans closer to Sesshomaru, and the ruined paper. "Is that you?"

"No, but it is supposed to be. However, owing to my poor artistic skills, this Sesshomaru is now apparently Uncle Rabbit-Sama."

The child's lips tremble upward. "…_Honored_ Uncle Rabbit-Sama..."

"Hai? What is it?"

"No, no, I was only correcting you. For you are greatly honored, uncle. Papa and mama tell me that you are and that I am to treat you as such."

"Hoh, I see. Arigato." Sesshomaru notices that the child has begun to lean against him. At last her tiny silvery head descends on his drawing arm.

"Hai," she breathes.

"It is alright," he says what he has always wished someone had told him, when he was small. "Kaede, it is alright. To be just as you are. It is alright. It is only a little harder, to know when to smile, and laugh, and notice others. But it is alright. And it is alright to make mistakes. As long as you also continue to have a purpose."

"…Hai. I…think I understand."

They sit there like that for another prolonged period, the Lord of the Western Lands seated with impeccable posture, chin proudly yet contemplatively jutted, the child leaning against his arm. Sesshomaru is content with long silences, and always has been. He feels that he has known this child all his life. He has indeed found a new charge to protect. He continues to have a great purpose of his own.

That is when Jaken comes screeching down the corridor and into the room. He trips over his Western High Minister's robes, which are entirely too large and shiny for him. "BABY! BABY COMING! HELP! CANNOT…BREATHE!"

"If you cannot breathe, how is it that you can _shriek_ so?" Sesshomaru snarls, rising quickly to his feet. He begins to walk towards the hysterical toad youkai when he senses an unusual weight on the end of his mokomoko.

He turns to investigate.

His brother's daughter is hanging on by all four limbs to the furry extension of his body. Kaede blushes when he raises an eyebrow at her.

"I am not a cab," he remarks.

"I want to be with Uncle Rabbit-Sama," the child mumbles into his tailfur. "I want to be with him. He understands Kaede-chan. He knows."

Sesshomaru almost feels as though he has been flung back in time and is speaking to his daughter—to his Rin, who right now, an adult woman, is in child-labor. A strange bubble of warmth births in the center of his chest and spreads to the rest of his body. Contentment. A reason. "Hold on tight," he rumbles, turning back to face, and follow, the gesticulating Jaken.

The birthing room sequestered for women only has been furnished months in advance. It is only down the corridor from Sesshomaru's master bedroom.

"Wait here," he snaps at Jaken, who, terrified of all things feminine, readily complies.

Kohaku, the loving and concerned husband of Rin, has stumbled up behind Jaken. "Time…it's time!" he endearingly gasps the obvious at the inu daiyoukai. "Can't…can't go in…! Will she be alright? It…birth…! It's a risky process, Sesshomaru-sama!"

Sesshomaru plops a hand down on Kohaku's shoulder. "Steady," he thunders. "You are a man now."

"But will she be alright?!"

Sesshomaru blinks. "Hnh. An excellent question. I shall find out."

And then he strides right into the inner sanctum of the birthing chamber.

Kaede the Elder, ancient but still living, younger sister of Kikyo, is already in there, the selected midwife for the process.

Near her, several maidservants of the House of Inu squeal in alarm and scatter away from the reclined figure of Rin, mumbling things like, "Sesshomaru-sama," and "oh, honored lord..!"

Sesshomaru sees none of them—he sees only Rin.

Rin's legs are straddled under a thick white blanket. She is rocking and heaving, her thick black hair a mess, her face pinched, sweaty and red-cheeked, while Kaede the Elder feels the swell of her belly for the state of the baby.

"Good," the old woman mutters. "Good, thy child has turned and is ready to be born, Lady Rin." She turns and squints at Sesshomaru. "This is a room for women only, great dog demon."

Sesshomaru pauses in his path.

But then Rin opens her tearful honey eyes, and looks right into his face from her place on the birthing futon. She bites her lip against a yelp of pain, and then she says, "_Papa_…!" and reaches.

Reaches for him.

And the Lord of the Western Lands makes up his mind. "I _won't_ be in your way," he rumbles, with the faintest trace of a threat in his voice, at Kaede.

The old miko smirks knowingly to herself. "I see," she says. "Then get thee over here."

But Sesshomaru has already taken his spot behind Rin, sliding her up to a sitting position. "Rin, I am here," he declares. How natural that phrase has become to him.

The hanyou girl whimpers and seizes both his hands in her own, squeezing so hard that her nails dig into his skin. Her battle begins, then, with her guardian firmly placed behind her. His presence makes her brave.

Very little time passes before there is a sweet wailing sound, that of a new life, swaddled in Kaede's arms. The maidservants who have helped all embrace each other and cry, and laugh.

"It is a girl," Kaede the Elder declares, her own good eye shining.

"A girl," murmurs a smaller voice. Sesshomaru realizes that it is coming from his niece, who is still latched onto his mokomoko. At her voice, and at this call to rejoice, Sesshomaru allows himself to smile fairly broadly.

He attempts to smooth his expression when Rin, crying and laughing as well, takes the cleaned-off baby girl into her arms and looks up at him, and says, "I did it! Here she is!"

"Hai," he replies, his chin resting on her forehead, something in his powerful iron chest exploding. For once he is not frustrated at his inability to put feelings into words. For there are no words that can adequately describe this moment, anyway.

"Kohaku! Everybody!" Rin cries at the doorway. "Come in! Come in and see!"

In trails a mob of loving family members. Kohaku, who flings himself down next to Rin, and holds her, and fawns over the baby; Inuyasha and Kagome; Kohaku's sister Sango; Sango's husband Miroku; and Jaken, who is fanning himself and looking faint. They take their seats in a circle around the mother, father, child, and the guardian behind the three, supporting them.

After Kohaku has held the baby and kissed her tiny perfect forehead, and touched her tiny pointed ears, and kissed her tiny freckles, he exchanges a look with Rin. Both nod at the same time.

"Sesshomaru-sama," Kohaku then ventures, "would you like to hold honored grand-daughter?"

And for the first time in his life, an expression crosses Sesshomaru's face that no one has ever seen before: Bashfulness.

He bumbles over his words. "Ano….watashi…er…"

"He's _scared_ of it," Inuyasha jeers good-naturedly.

That does it. "I am not afraid of it," Sesshomaru retorts, with a pompous fluff of the mokomoko. "Give it here," he adds, nodding airily at Kohaku. "This Sesshomaru has been quite impatient to hold it."

Rin covers her mouth to hide a grin. Rin always knows.

Sesshomaru holds the baby out at arm's length, cupping her head with one hand and bracing her torso with the other. He wrinkles his nose. "It is small. Smaller than you, Rin. And it smells quite peculiar."

Inuyasha bawls a laugh.

Kagome punches him in the arm with one hand, and dabs at her moist eyes with a tissue with the other. "_Osuwari_," she mumbles, out of long-standing habit.

Rin emits her silvery giggle. "Papa-sama, that's to be expected from an infant. Do you like your honored grand-daughter, then?"

"Need you ask?" Carefully the Lord of the Western Lands draws the kicking bundle close. "This Sesshomaru quite adores the Smaller One." He sniffs haughtily. "Behold, all, the Heiress of the Inu Clan."

"Hai!" the collected company of old days cries in unison, acknowledging the beautiful new life.

Rin tries for her crafty look, which, as always before, comes across as cutely puckish. She leans back against Sesshomaru, sweat and all, secure that her disheveled state will not disgust him. After all, what she has accomplished is a great and daunting task, and no one admires strength of purpose more than Sesshomaru-sama does. "If Papa-sama does not put his smile back on, this Rin-chan will demonstrate to everyone present where Papa-sama's ticklish spots are, on his honored tummy and under his honored armpits. For I know these grave secrets." She cocks her head at him.

Sesshomaru raises one eyebrow a second time. "My daughter is a merciless combatant in battle," he comments, with the faintest attempt at a mortified expression. And then a smile, small and mellow, very much like comparing a breeze to everyone else's grinning hurricane wind, surfaces on his face. "Better?"

"Much," the hanyou girl chirps, scooting down lower in his arms. "Give back my baby, Papa."

The daiyoukai's eyes slip to the window strategically over Rin's head. His smile fades into a pout. "Just a moment…I have only just taken her. You shall have her all day."

"And all night," Kohaku murmurs ruefully, but he is grinning more broadly and crookedly than anyone, as a tiny fist seizes his finger.

"Papa-samaaaa," Rin fairly sings, looking radiant at Sesshomaru's evident devotion. "Kohaku and I would be more than happy for you to look after her, to take turns at night when she cries."

"Very willing," her husband adds, nodding his messy brown head. He chuckles. "Her grip is strong like her mother's!"

"But she has her father's freckles," Rin comments, leaning forward to kiss her husband. When she withdraws, she curls around and faces Sesshomaru and opens her arms expectantly. "Come now, big loving guard dog-sama. I have worked hard for this reward."

"Oh, very well. I am not ticklish, by the way," Sesshomaru comments, carefully and gently relinquishing the infant.

"I think we should test that claim," Inuyasha smirks, crackling his fingers and knuckles.

"I think you should shove it," Sesshomaru retorts, scowling. And crackling his fingers and knuckles right back.

"I think you should MAKE me."

"I think you should SIT," Kagome hisses at her husband, wedging in between the sibling banter. "And I think that is the most beautiful baby girl I've seen since my Kaede."

"HOH," Sesshomaru guffaws. "Otouto-san's oksaama is like my Rin. Marvelous."

"Yeah, yeah, and you're a neutered mutt," grumbles the little brother, partially pacified by his wife. "A big tame PUPPY."

"Inuyasha, shut up. And come with me." Sesshomaru abruptly stands. Rin and Kohaku blink at him, suddenly devoid of their big fluffy armchair.

"What, are we gonna fight?" The tail-wagging eagerness is unmistakable in Inuyasha's tone. The two have resorted to such harmless, ritualistic battles, almost as immaterial as play-fighting, in the previous several years.

"No, I am too stiff from sitting behind Rin these past hours. We are going to talk."

Inuyasha looks like a kid bereft of his lollipop. "Keh, fine. About?"

"Your daughter. Come with me. Rin, if you need anything, call for me. As always." And Sesshomaru quite literally flows out of the birthing chamber.

"My DAUGHTER?" Inuyasha blares, in hot pursuit.

"Is she still stuck to mokomoko?" Sesshomaru glances over his shoulder, and down.

"What?!"

"No, that is good. She must still be in the birthing room with the others. Then we may speak candidly of her."

"Sesshomaru, how come I never know what yer talkin' about?"

"Because you are stupid."

"….I'm just gonna let that pass."

"Oh, good for you, Inuyasha. I am so proud of you." Sesshomaru is actually smirking. Rin doesn't need to blackmail him with tickle threats for _this_ smile to surface.

Inuyasha attempts to aim every fiber of irritation in his being at his big brother in one constipated-looking glare. "So, the POINT?"

Sesshomaru deliberately pauses as long as he can before Inuyasha's face impatiently turns the hue of a ripe beet. Then, quite calmly and pleasantly, he begins, "There is something I have been meaning to give back to you. And yet, I feel now, it is more appropriate that I should give it to your daughter." He folds his hands inside the trailing sleeves of his kimono.

Inuyasha cocks his head like a curious kitten. "…The hell did you ever borrow from ME?"

"Observe." Sesshomaru steps inside his private chambers, surprisingly sparsely adorned considering his vast wealth and power, and opens the drawer of a plain cherrywood desk by his futon. There are many strange and inexplicable objects inside that desk.

But Inuyasha recognizes the fan their father had made for his mother, impeccably preserved, the instant Sesshomaru draws it from the desk drawer and opens it.

The younger dog demon has to sharply turn his face from the desk, still in the threshold of Sesshomaru's room, to compose himself. His eyes are stinging fiercely. He swallows, but his voice is still thick when he says, "Oh. _That_."

Sesshomaru's eyes are on Inuyasha, keenly scrutinizing him. "There is no shame in your emotion. Do not turn from me like some coward afraid of a witness to his tears." He assumes that pedagogical, lecturing tone that has always bizarrely characterized his dealings with his little brother. "Really, Inuyasha, you must learn to let others in."

"_Look who's talkin'_! An' I'm _not _all upset!" Inuyasha loudly sniffs, and turns, jaw jutting, to glare at Sesshomaru, with distinctly bloodshot eyes. "An' STOP teachin' at me, fer cryin' out loud, it's SO annoying, _Stoneface-sama_! Lord…Lord _Anal-Retentive_!"

The Lord of the Western Lands bows his head, and vaguely smiles. "Ah, a good parry. If slightly juvenile. But, if you ask around, this Sesshomaru has been amending his thoughts on the matter of stoicism, and feelings, and personal attachments, the past several years. On how easy, or hard, it can be, to show all these things to others. Which brings me to your daughter—you _can _give this to her for me, can you not?"

"COURSE I can! Jeez. Even a 'halfbreed mutt' knows how ta fetch and retrieve!" Inuyasha grabs the fan from Sesshomaru, and once it's in his grasp he fingers it. "You…really kept it well. Thought ya'd ripped it apart like…ten years ago."

"It somehow never seemed a suitable fate for the thing." Sesshomaru's face is as inscrutable as ever. He clears his throat.

Inuyasha has long since given up trying to read intention or heart in his brother's face. However, though he'd be loathe to admit it, he knows there is more of the latter under the surface than he had realized. He feels Sesshomaru's awkwardness at this impasse, even though he can't see it. "…Gotcha. Hey, Sesshomaru…?"

"Oh hells. I know _that_ tone. 'Hoy, Sessh-oni-sama, how does one perform a heron stance?' 'Hoy, Sessh-oni-sama, does someone die if you stick them in the belly with your sword?' 'Hoy, Sessh-oni-sama, is it a bad idea to piss against the direction of the breeze on a cold day'…?"

"Knock it off!" Inuyasha's jaw juts farther. "Don't worry, I won't ask stupid questions for TOO long a period…"

"Hoh. Right, otouto-san."

"I'm gonna ignore yer facetious tone."

"You do that."

"ANY-way, have you ever noticed the irony of this whole setup? That yer just like father n' me? A powerful demon…hey are you listening? UWAH."

"Of _course_ I am listening, how can one ignore such bellowing?" Sesshomaru rolls his eyes, which had been averted to the birthing room while Inuyasha spoke. "I am only distracted by my concern for Rin's needs--"

"EXACTLY!" Inuyasha points the fan at his brother, poking him in the chest. He grins at Sesshomaru's ruffled grunt as he continues, "You made a big fancy home for Rin to stay, to be safe and taken care of, while yer off doin' your aristocrat-warrior stuff. Conquering lands and all. Yer a demon who wants to take care of a human girl. How's that different from what I did for Kagome, or from what dad did for my mom…?"

Sesshomaru's eyes tighten, and he thinks for a fleeting instant to strike his brother for comparing his beautiful daughter to that Izayoi, that woman who still causes his chest to hurt, for the changes she and his father unwelcomingly brought about.

But he is trying to let go. To let go of all that, now. Slowly. "It had…occurred to me. Something to protect. Someone for whom to be accountable."

"Yeah. Bingo….Gomen…I mean, sorry, I didn't mean to…y'know…I mean I know even this was …hard…" Inuaysha brandishes the fan awkwardly.

"There is no need. We are simply not looking over our shoulders anymore, but forward. Come then, and let us return to the topic of your daughter."

"Kay. Talk."

"You find it troubling, do you not? Relating to her."

Inuyasha's jaw grinds. "…Yeah." He closes the fan, and sticks it in his belt. "She doesn't look at anyone. She doesn't smile or laugh. Or do anything…spontaneous. Touch makes her squeamish…any touch. And mistakes. It's not that she's depressed or somethin'. It's like she can't show how she feels, period. She's like a…she's…I dunno. It scares…er, Kagome."

"It is not so hard as it seems. This Sesshomaru has felt what Kaede-chan feels. I have a proposal. Send her Wednesdays to have tea with me. I shall labor to help her understand what is expected of her, by others who can smile and laugh and do spontaneous things, as you have said."

"…Are you serious?"

"Most of the time, yes."

"No, I didn't m...wow. Yeah, ya just proved it." Inuyasha chuckles, wiping his face tiredly with his hand.

"So what is your answer to my proposal?"

"…What would you say if I asked you to send Rin to have tea with me every Wednesday?"

"I would gladly concede, but I would also tell you that if you caused her any pain, even for an instant, I would rip all your limbs off your body and then eat the trunk that was left, after salting it and dragging it across Japan, from coast to coast."

"Yep. That about covers my answer."

"Very well. Might I expect Kaede-chan tomorrow for tea, then?"

"Hai, honored Looord Sesshomaru." Inuyasha adopts a gently taunting air of pomposity. "At four eww'clawck shahhhp, with bissscuits."

"Nani? Oh, ancestors. Arigato, bastard idiot."

"Keh heh, you're welcome, shit-face. Guess I should be thankin' _you_, after all, for helping me understand my daughter. For helping _her_."

"It is alright, Inuyasha. Really, fool, do you not know? It is only my purpose, after all. Now, go lick a toilet bowl…and be safe. I am tired of constantly saving your ass."

And Sesshomaru turns to go. Sesshomaru is always the one to end these conversations, always has been, with a rude sort of benediction—but this time there is something different about it. Something kinder, and more tolerant.

A long pause.

Inuyasha watches his big brother gliding back into Rin's birthing chamber to check on her.

When Sesshomaru's back is to the younger dog demon, Inuyasha smiles at him in a way that completely lacks malice. He thinks on the increasingly permanent fixture of his older sibling in his family's life. He is slightly awed at the fact that he is glad for that development.

There is something weirdly comforting about having Sesshomaru around. The select few who have really known him, and become his allies, whether tenuous or firm that bond, all feel it. A sense of safety, when Sesshomaru is looming around somewhere in the vicinity, keeping watch over them. A true guardian, who once scoffed aloofly at the concept of protecting anyone.

Inuyasha puts his hand on the fan of his mother, and the smile grows. "Well, I'll be damned," he mumbles, as summation of everything he was just now thinking about.

Back in the birthing room, Rin and Kohaku look up together and smile at their guardian's return. "Papa-sama," Rin trills, "Kagome-chan and I were just talking about how all this must be what 'coming full-circle' means."

"I almost agree," Sesshomaru rumbles as he kneels next to her. He glances round the room. "But one thing must be done to complete this circle. Kaede-chan?"

"Hai, Honored Uncle Rabbit-sama?" The child's timid voice breathes from directly behind him. He turns to find her again embedded in mokomoko.

The company collectively blinks in confusion.

"Uncle _what_?" Miroku mumbles to Sango, who shrugs. Poor Jaken looks further perturbed, dabbing at his brow with a handkerchief and shaking his green old head.

Kagome giggles at the pair of stoic silver-haired dog demons, one adult, one child, despite having no idea of the name's origin. "That's so sweet," she coos.

"It is an inside joke," Sesshomaru factually explains. "At any rate." He cranes his neck to look at his niece. "Your father will be bestowing a gift upon you from me, which comes from your grandmother."

"You mean mama's mother?"

"No. Your father's mother."

Kagome gasps.

Silence falls over the room, but Kaede, only five, seems to miss the significance of this supremely generous peace offering. She nods and ruffles around in mokomoko. "Arigato," she murmurs, with a seated bow.

"And this Sesshomaru has a job for you. Well, first, a question."

"What is that, honored uncle?"

"Kaede, do you have someone to protect?"

The child cocks her head.

"Someone for whom you are accountable, Kaede?"

"…I do not know, honored uncle."

"You will now. When I am away, it is your duty to look after your younger cousin, this Smaller One in Rin's arms."

Kaede cocks her little silver head at the gurgling infant bundle. She emerges from the furry white mound of mokomoko for a closer look. She dares to gaze at the baby's eyes, and turns pink with pleasure when the so-called Smaller One coos and reaches for her hand. "I will do as honored uncle asks," she says.

Sesshomaru nods. "Yours is an honored task indeed. Good. It is now that the circle is complete." He looks around the room at all the astounded, and touched, faces. He sees Jaken's bewildered loyalty, Kagome-san's radiant pleasure, Sango-san's and the houshi-sama's dawning understanding. He sees, returning through the doorway, Inuyasha's quiet awe and, yes, a growing mutual note of respect. He sees Kohaku's worshipful, teary, freckled smile, the face of a man worthy of his daughter. He sees Kaede's birthing self, a precious, tiny smile that he will make it his duty to elicit, Wednesday after Wednesday to come.

And he looks for his anchor.

He finds the face of Rin.

Joy.

Compassion.

Purpose.

She smiles at him and mouths, "I love you, papa."

Sesshomaru nods once, clearly, emphatically, back. His face is blank. But he bridles his chest and straightens his back and folds his arms, chin high.

He assumes his eternal position, of protector, with pride.


End file.
